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TEN" YEARS 



SPIRITUAL MEDIUMS: 



AN INQUIRY CONCERNING 

THE ETIOLOGY OF CERTAIN PHENOMENA 

CALLED SPIRITUAL. 



BY 



FRANCIS GERRY FAIRFIELD. 






NEW YORK: 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

549 AND 551 BROADWAY. 

1875. 



t 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, 

By D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



PEEFATOET NOTE. 



In the following pages the author submits the 
results of ten years of observation and experiment, 
conducted in the intervals of other work, concern- 
ing the nature of certain phenomena confidently 
relied upon by spiritualists as demonstrative of the 
agency of departed spirits, and by Prof. Crookes as 
proving the existence of a force termed psychic. In 
these investigations it has been a fixed principle 
with me to accept only verified testimony as to the 
facts, preferring that of medical observers. The 
reader is to understand, therefore, that the facts 
stated herein invariably rest either upon observation 
and experiment personally conducted, or upon the 
veracity of accredited scientific witnesses ; and, in all 
cases where any room for doubt existed, I have been 
at the pains to investigate personally, and to accept 
or reject upon test of actual observation. I am pre- 
pared to stand sponsor, therefore, for the various 



4 PREFATORY NOTE. 

observations, medical and physiological, which I have 
had occasion to detail in putting my memoranda in 
form. 

Mainly, however, I have relied upon observations 
personally verified, and experiments personally in- 
stituted, on the ground that compilation can never 
be thoroughly intelligent. Until a man has actually 
dissected a brain, he knows very little about one, 
however lucid may be the explanations in the text- 
books, however accurate the illustrations. At the 
same time, while carefully verifying, it has not been 
my intention to produce an elaborate treatise, but 
simply to make clear to the reader's mind, from 
physiological induction and by experiment, that the 
phenomena called spiritual are morbid nervous phe- 
nomena, to indicate their etiology, and to trace out 
their various philosophical relations. 

F. G. F. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGB 

I. Peeliminaby Obsebvations .... 7 

II. Method of Investigation and Summary of 

Conclusions 18 

III. Cases of Neevo-Psychic Phenomena . . 34 

IV. Physiology of the Keevo-Psychio Seeies . 92 

Y. Neeve-Atmospheee and its Agency in Neevo- 

Moleculae Physics 114 

VI. Memoeanda of Reevo -Dynamic Phenomena 134 

VII. Physiology of the Volition and Intelli- 
gence involved in the Foeegoing Seeies 159 

VIII. A Glance at the Highee Relations of the 

Subject 179 



TEN TEARS 



SPIEITUAL MEDIUMS. 



PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 

On the night of October 14th, after the red 
scrimmage at Jena, which was to Prussia in 1806 
what Sadowa was to Austria in 1866, a notable co- 
incidence befell. 

"While Napoleon was dictating orders for the 
next day in that dull university town, having that 
memorable afternoon shattered a state, two lights 
glimmered from the windows of two adjacent houses. 
The one was the study-lamp of Hegel (to whom the 
stars were but a brilliant leprosy on the face of the 
heavens), who was at that moment engaged in de- 
monstrating that history, a notable turning-point of 
which had that day been settled, is but a manifes- 
tation of the anima mundi — Latin for world-soul. 



8 PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 

The other was that of a journeyman cobbler, since 
differenced from other cobblers as the cobbler of 
Jena, who (in detestable doggerel that, in company 
with volumes of other doggerel not less detestable, 
has descended to posterity) was busy with a rhyming 
criticism on General von Blunderhead and his staff : 

" To force the passes of the Saale 

They thought no enemy would try, 
But then the passes of the Saale 
They should with cannon fortify ; 
Whoever overlooked this 
Didn't understand his business." 

A remarkable juxtaposition this ! — belonging to 
the gossip of history, but no less remarkable for 
that. The maker, the philosopher, and the satirist 
of history — three men, of whom the cobbler may 
have been the greatest, for aught the world knows — 
grouped together of a night in the same dingy little 
town, plying their respective but kindred vocations ! 

Now, those who think with Hegel, that the world 
has a soul, will not hesitate to find in this picturesque 
coincidence a dash of the grim humor that occasion- 
ally appears in historical events, and to hold the 
anima mundi responsible for it ; while those who 
have outlived their dream of an anima mundi, will 
perforce refer the tableau to the category of fortui- 
tous accidents : for, for the purposes of the present 
investigation, mankind naturally fall into two classes, 
namely, those who suppose the world has a soul, and 



PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 9 

those who through troublous cogitation have dis- 
abused themselves of that beautiful but experimen- 
tally undemonstrated fancy. 

But, were beauty reason for believing — and a 
man, like, a woman, often feels his way to truth 
faster than he can reason his way thither — Hegel's 
theory of a world-soul, at once the poet and artist 
of Nature, would long since have been accepted as 
fact, in lieu of haunting our lives as a mystic dream, 
too weird to be admitted into the list of realities, 
but too beautiful to be rejected. 

According to this theory, which, under various 
forms, thoroughly leavens modern literature, man is 
a denizen of two worlds — the one subsensible, and 
pervaded and moved by psychic forces, the other 
sensible, and subject to the operation of physical 
forces ; and so far has scientific investigation tended 
to sustain this hypothesis, fanciful as it appears, that 
it is now conceded by many scientific men that two 
distinct forces, the one physical, the other psychical, 
enter into all our experiences and constitute their 
basis. 

Whether the natures of these forces are modi- 
fications of the same ultimate reality, or whether 
they constitute parallel series of realities— these, on 
the other hand, are questions upon which scientific 
men are far from coincident. Prof. Huxley and 
Herbert Spencer appear to accept the first position ; 
and Prof. Tyndall indicates his coincidence in his 
second lecture on light, when he maintains that a 



10 PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 

man cannot consider, far less answer the question 
of what light is, without transporting himself to a 
world that underlies the sensible one, and out of 
which, in accordance with rigid law, all optical phe- 
nomena spring. The realization of this subsensible 
world is a task the learned lecturer delegates to the 
imagination as its function in scientific inquiry. On 
the contrary, Sir David Brewster dissents from the 
position of these eminent gentlemen, and nods his 
scientific yes to the theory of a parallel series of 
realities. 

From this balancing of man upon a pivot be- 
tween two worlds has arisen a material hypothesis 
of the soul, the exponents of which assume that our 
physical organizations are pervaded with an attenu- 
ated and subsensible substance, in which the psy- 
chical force resides, and which withdraws from the 
sensible organism at death, a psychical and subsen- 
sible entity, individual still, but a denizen of the 
subsensible world that, according to Prof. Tyndall, 
underlies the sensible one. The general aspects of 
this theory have been so well developed by Sergeant 
Cox as to render original definition unnecessary. 
His propositions are : 

That the material universe is encompassed with 
spirit pervading it everywhere, not individuated but 
in aggregation, as the atmosphere envelops the earth. 

That this spirit-substance penetrates all matter 
and moulds it to all shapes. 

That in organic beings it becomes a distinct in- 



PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. H 

dividuality and operates through the vital force that 
moves all organic structures. 

That this spirit possesses the germ, grows with 
it to maturity, and is released from it at the cessa- 
tion of organic life. 

That exactly as the material atoms pass from 
mineral to vegetable, and from vegetable to animal 
structure, so spirit advances from being a mere pro- 
toplasm of spirit, by the same process of expansion 
and progression, to have first a separate being, then 
a progress in one stage of existence, then a transi- 
tion to another stage, and so onward. 

That the portion of spirit which becomes a man 
is born with him, grows with his growth, and is in 
fact himself, in a condition in which he is percep- 
tible to the senses of other men, and therefore to 
them a material being. 

Finally, that the spirit thus matured is not again 
absorbed into the mass, but, when the body drops 
away from it, preserves its individuality, and as a 
soul of psychical being becomes a conscious denizen 
of the subsensible universe that encompasses and 
pervades the material. 

This exposition constitutes the philosophical 
basis of modern spiritualism, protean as its phenom- 
ena are, and varied as are its intellectual aspects. 
It is not my intention here, however, to enter upon 
elaborate criticism of these postulates — further than 
to remark that no good reason exists for exempting 
psychic phenomena from the law of the correlation 



12 PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 

of forces ; and that, if psychological and physiologi- 
cal investigations exhibit one tendency more than 
another, it is to establish the correlation of vital and 
psychical phenomena. " Life/ 5 says M. Alphonse de 
Candolle, 1 in a definition that is in rigid accord with 
the facts of physiology, "is the transformation of 
physical motion into plastic or nervous motion." 
All animal tissues are endowed with force (life) pe- 
culiar to themselves. 

Nor would it be candid to object to them, on the 

1 It is curiously interesting to trace step by step the progressive 
attempts of thinkers to give a comprehensive definition of life. 
Among the ancients the soul is the life-principle. Hegel's idea was 
that of the infinite potentiality expressing itself in individual form ; 
and with Kant life is self-aim. Schelling, a greater than Hegel in 
some respects, leaves the question of the potential an open one, and 
says that life is the tendency to individuation — a metaphysical syno- 
nym for Spencer's law of differentiation. Then comes Cuvier's strict- 
ly physiological view of the case : " Dans chaque etre, la vie est un 
ensemble qui resulte de Paction et de la reaction mutuelle de toutes ses 
parties" Then the later definition : " La vie est V ensemble des fonc- 
tions qui resistent d la mort." Until recently these definitions have 
been accepted without criticism. Lawrence, of some note in England 
early in the present century, says, " Life is the assemblage of all the 
functions, and the general result of their exercise." Says Dr. Whe- 
well, " Life is the system of vital functions." Says Herbert Spencer, 
with the special turning-point of the synthetic philosophy in view, 
" Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external 
relations." M. de Candolle' s definition occurs in his " History of the 
Sciences," p. 457, as a general summing up of the results of physio- 
logical investigation. All these definitions have the merit of explain- 
ing one aspect of the subject. Why not say also that life is the cor- 
relation of material forces into psychical forces ? which would express 
the fundamental property of organism. 



PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 13 

score that they represent merely an attenuated form 
of materialism ; for, in the nature of things, tethered 
as all our thinking is to material symbols, it is im- 
possible to think of spirit, except in the terms of 
subsensible matter. I am conscious of myself as 
force, but, when I wish to express that consciousness, 
I find myself inexorably tied to symbols originating 
in the material, and involving the notion of exten- 
sion. It is true that body is a thing extended, and 
mind a thing that thinks ; but so interwoven with 
all moods of consciousness is the antithesis of subject 
and object, that I can find no symbol to represent 
the ultimate reality in which the two are united, and 
in which I am conscious of participating. To blame 
the exponents of spiritualism, therefore, because 
they have not transcended material symbols in the 
literature of the subject, is to blame them because 
they have not effected the impossible — the impos- 
sible even to Hegel, whose monologues of talk, 
sighed forth by starts in a noiseless voice (as Heyne 
paradoxically expresses it), would have supplied a 
new series of symbols, had it been possible. 

Again, that in their hands the transcendental 
often degenerates into twaddle only proves the inti- 
mate relation that subsists between the two — a rela- 
tion that no philosopher thoroughly escapes. 

Few minds possess the pictorial energy adequate 
to the task of visualizing the invisible, and this is 
what the literature of spiritualism practically at- 
tempts, only to fall into a series of paradoxes in 



14 PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 

which bodiless body appears as the habitual defini- 
tion of spirit : so impossible is it to disconnect bur 
most intangible fancies from the idea of extension. 

I am tethered to matter as to a pivot. I may 
walk round and round, and round and round my 
tether in a circle, till I drop dead by the way, but can 
never snap the invisible thread that binds me to the 
centre and belittles my most discursive moods. Yet 
more : when I drop dead of weariness, I return to 
matter, the silent cemetery of man. It begets me — 
devours me. Yet I defy it, and insist, with the 
idealist, that it is a fancy of mine. 

Our little lives are thus likened to hours in the 
turret of Notre-Dame. I remember as if it had 
been but yesterday, though years have passed since 
then, the sunny Parisian afternoon when I slipped 
through a little door into twilight, and toiled up the 
three-hundred and eighty-nine steps that lead to the 
dizzy gallery supported by slender columns. The 
slanting sun shot yellow beams through thin slits in 
the wall. Then came two hundred steps in the 
dark ; then I suddenly emerged into a little four- 
square w^orld, half-way between Paris and heaven. 
Its people were apes with the bosoms of women and 
the brawny hands and arms of men, dogs and bears, 
and elephants and goats, and devils as huge as Her- 
cules, with the scaly backs of dragons and the knotted 
muscles of gladiators — their faces prolonged into 
beaks or snouts, as suited the whim of their creator. 
I remember one terrible bird, half eagle, half macaw, 



PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 15 

that had its hideous head smothered in drapery, like 
an old woman's in the rain. 

I never think of that afternoon in the turret of 
Notre-Dame, without likening it to life, and the 
Paris far beneath, girt with its ribbon of a river, to 
the subsensible world that Prof. Tyndall talks about. 
From the dark you emerge into it, with its dragons 
and gargouilles. The hum of a (to you) subsensible 
world comes up from beneath. Lastly, you can only 
escape by dropping down into the dark. So with 
life. 

What wonder, then, if like Epimenides men fall 
into mystic trances^ and insist that they talk with 
spirits % Conscious of being something, yet suspend- 
ed by a hair over the bottomless pit of nothingness, 
knowing that the hair must snap asunder to-day or 
to-morrow, on the third day at the latest, the man 
who can drink his weird and make no moan is braver 
than most men are, whatever his disloyalty to the 
supernal. 

The sphinx of matter has nothing to say as to 
the problem of destiny that keeps mankind so ill at 
ease, nor any thing to say of man, save that — 

" He is he knows not what, 

He comes lie knows not whence ; 
His whither knows he not, 
Save that he passes hence." 

Four baffling silences ! The hold of spiritualism on 
the minds of thoughtful men is thus due to the fact 



16 PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 

that it assumes to solve these problems of being and 
destiny, that vex a man the more the more he 
thinks, by actual experiment, and to verify experi- 
mentally that which has hitherto been accepted as a 
mystery. 

I have dwelt by way of introduction on the phil- 
osophical and religious aspects of the subject, be- 
cause spiritualism assumes to be a philosophy and a 
religion, resting solidly on psychical phenomena de- 
monstrative of the reality of psychical beings and of 
a psychic universe interpenetrating and pervading 
the material. Its mediums are its priests — its proph- 
ets — its revealers. It assumes as a necessary pos- 
tulate that by-and-by, in the process of evolution, 
will come, as the product of human progress and as 
its ultimate result, a man so psychical in structure as 
to live en rajpport with the subsensible world. It is 
urged, in support of this view, that man is becoming 
more and more nervous, and more and more psychi- 
cal, as evolution proceeds and centuries pass. It is a 
cardinal principle of the system that the medium 
possesses and represents in varying intensity this 
higher psychical organization, and that, by virtue of 
this possession, he is the revealer of the psychic uni- 
verse ; and its exponents point to the phenomena as 
evidences of the authenticity of his pretensions. If 
they are susceptible of explanation without calling 
upon the denizens of another world, and upon phys- 
iological principles, then the pretensions of spiritu- 
alism are destitute of proper foundation. But let it 



PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 17 

be finally conceded that, although there has been no 
little jugglery mixed with them, by men anxious to 
turn a penny with seances, the phenomena have been 
subjected to rigid scientific scrutiny, and constitute, 
at least, valuable additions to the verified facts of 
psychology. On the other hand, while the scientific 
frankly concede the authenticity of the phenomena, 
strange as they are, it will, I apprehend, become the 
exponents of spiritualism to own that, considered as 
a philosophy or as a religious system, or as contribu- 
tions to either, the speculations and revelations of 
professed mediums are of no value whatever. 

This by way of introduction. In what follows I 
shall limit myself to the scientific aspects of the 
phenomena, leaving generalizations to the fancy of 
the reader. 



II. 



METHOD OF INVESTIGATION, AND SUMMARY OF CON- 
CLUSIONS. 

I was a boy of sixteen when, in the winter of 
1856-57, the first wave of spiritualism swept over 
the little town of Stafford, Connecticut, now one of 
its New-England centres of activity. Mediums had 
occasionally dropped in and run brief careers previous 
to that date. Among them was Mr. Home, a native 
of Lebanon, Conn., whose romantic career in Europe 
has since attracted considerable attention, and with 
whom the tests of Prof. Crookes have been mainly 
conducted. He was in those days a local celebrity, 
and journeyed from town to town, giving seances. I 
remember him as a tall, heavy-faced, awkward, red- 
dish-haired stripling of from twenty to twenty-five 
years of age, with the lost expression of counte- 
nance that physicians ordinarily associate with the 
epileptic malady ; and at several of his seances I was 
present. 

"When, in 1864, 1 became a resident of New York 
City, it devolved on me, as the representative of a 
daily newspaper, to study the phenomena as illus- 



METHOD OF INVESTIGATION. 19 

trated at Metropolitan Hall, in Sixth. Avenue, and 
afterward at Dodworth Hall, in Broadway, as well 
as to attend all private seances at wliicli admission 
was attainable. The first result of this practice, at 
tended with every possible device to detect imposi 
tion, was naturally a somewhat critical familiarity, 
not only with the personnel of mediums themselves, 
but with the mental aura of trance, clairvoyance, 
and the kindred sensorial phenomena. Secondly, 
after duly testing the more remarkable feats of Mr. 
0. H. Foster, and other celebrated mediums, in every 
available manner, I was reluctantly forced to dismiss 
one scientific explanation after another, as inadequate 
to the facts, and either to suspend opinion, or to cast 
about for an explanation, both adequate to the phe- 
nomena and rigidly scientific in its terms. Phantom 
hands writing messages with Faber's pencils, under 
conditions in which deception is impossible, are some- 
what different from the clever manipulations of a 
Blitz or a Houdin; and I have seen them come 
slowly out of nothingness in my own room, pick up 
a pencil, scribble a message in very legible hand- 
writing, and dissolve into nothingness again, leaving 
the pencil as quiet as it was before. I have seen a 
pencil write without hands on my own table, and 
subscribe initials at the end; but it has been the 
phenomena of writing, not the messages, that have 
been of value. 

I was very particular in testing the question 
whether these phenomena were merely illusive — 



20 METHOD OF INVESTIGATION, AND 

a phantasmagoria of the senses — haying frequently 
witnessed the phenomenon at mesmeric seances, of 
that kind of psychic control that enables the opera- 
tor to impress illusions at will upon the senses of 
his subject. I was accordingly careful to note that 
no drowsiness nor nervous shock on my part preceded 
the phantom appearances ; also, not to permit my at- 
tention to be fixed upon any one article in the room, 
and to avoid personal contact with the medium pre- 
vious to the exhibition. These precautions are more 
important than they at first appear ; for many facts, 
both experimental and observed, have convinced me 
that the semi-mesmeric state is more easily induced 
than most scientific observers are aware. For ex- 
ample, a person who will fix his eyes on an object at 
an angle above them, without elevating his face ac- 
cordingly, and retain them in that position, may in- 
duce an unconquerable drowsiness in from four to 
six minutes ; while, to fix the eyes in the same man- 
ner on an object on the level with them, produces 
the phenomenon with far less rapidity. Part of the 
result in the first instance is, therefore, due to the 
physiological action on the optic nerves and ganglia, 
of lifting the eyes at an unnatural angle, and retain- 
ing them fixedly in that position. Indeed, in many 
persons that I have experimented with as to this 
point, the phenomenon of trance rapidly supervenes 
with the eyes in this position, and in every instance 
a state bordering upon somnambulism has been in- 
duced. It is a curious fact, too, that no other un- 



SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS.. 21 

natural position of the eyes has this physiological 
effect ; although passing the tips of the fingers slow- 
ly and rhythmically across velvet induces an analo- 
gous drowsiness. 

Thus, taking every possible precaution to avoid 
those nervous states in which illusions spring up 
naturally, or are easily imposed upon the senses, I 
was soon able to state authoritatively that the phe- 
nomena are not phantasmagorial, or mere imaginings, 
incident to an unnatural nervous or cerebral state, 
but actual objective existences — real to the senses, 
real as matters of fact. The theory that the phe- 
nomena are due to conscious or unconscious cerebral 
action, unless cerebral action is competent to lift 
heavy bodies without hands, though it applies to a 
considerable series of the facts, breaks down in view 
of the more important series. Morbid cerebral action 
may cause its victim to see phantoms, but it cannot 
endow him with the power to make others see them. 
Nevertheless, there is a great deal of unconscious 
cerebration interwoven with the phenomena of spir- 
itualism. 

I shall not stop to discuss either of these theories, 
further than to say that they break down under 
practical tests. 

The experimental and observational investiga- 
tions into the nature and physiology of mesmeric 
phenomena were, however, though the psychological 
theory did break down, of value in one important 
particular: as they led to a careful study of the 



22 METHOD OF INVESTIGATION, AND 

literature of the subject and a careful examination 
of the phenomena in common between mesmerism 
and spiritualism. One of these, namely, clairvoyance, 
in some of its aspects, is the pivot and centre of 
the psychical states associated with spiritualism as 
well as of those associated with mesmerism ; and to 
the physiology of this state — for there is no psychi- 
cal phenomenon without its physiological exponents 
— it seemed to me worth the while to direct my at- 
tention. It might or might not furnish the clew 
to the production of the phantom .phenomena, of 
which Prof. Crookes has since recorded very full 
memoranda ; but, whether it did or did not, its re- 
sults would contribute somewhat to the stock of 
physiological observation. 

But the investigation gradually enlarged and 
opened new vistas, finally extending itself further 
and further into the domain of medical psychology, 
with observations from life of morbid psychical 
states and of their physiological causes, microscopic 
studies of nervous tissue and of cerebral structure, 
and experimental inquiries as to the functions of 
the various nerve-centres. 

I was led in this direction, from finding that 
clairvoyance is often the psychological exponent of 
a certain morbid nervous condition, and with a view 
to ascertain whether it is ever dissociated from ner- 
vous perversion. This, of course, eventuated in my 
gathering as many memoranda from life as possible, 
of instances in which clairvoyance and its associate 



SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS. 23 

states were confessedly morbid, with a view to com- 
pare symptoms and note points of difference. I 
commenced these special studies in the summer of 
1868, and have since pursued them in the interstices 
of work as a journalist and contributor to scientific 
literature — with what result scientific men must 
judge. 

My own observations of spiritualism since that 
period, with an eye sharpened by long study of ner- 
vous disturbances, have convinced me of three things : 
First, that its phenomena are invariably associated 
with nervous and generally with mental perversion, 
and that the moral aberrations and morbid impulses 
associated with mediums are the exponents of that 
perversion ; secondly,' that mediums, as a rule, par- 
ticularly those addicted to trance, are persons of 
defective physical organization; thirdly, that the 
seances rapidly exhaust the nervous energies of the 
operator. I have notes of one instance in which the 
medium died of the exhaustion consequent upon his 
most celebrated feat, that of tearing an iron sink, 
incorporated into the solid masonry of a wall, from 
its moorings, by simply placing his hand upon the 
edge of it. Mr. Benjamin Hawkes, of Liverpool, 
England, a medium of some celebrity, fell dead under 
circumstances somewhat similar in the autumn of 
1873, and, notwithstanding his magnificent phy- 
sique^ Mr. Home is an invalid at forty. So with 
Miss Kate Fox. Mr. J. E. Brown develops symp- 
toms of exceeding physical exhaustion when his 



24 METHOD OF INVESTIGATION, AND 

seances are at all prolonged, or call for more than 
ordinary feats. 

Again, in seances given by trance-mediums, I 
have observed that those significant prodromata of 
the fit in its ordinary aspects, sudden cadaverous 
pallor, a kind of fading of the eye, accompanied with 
dilatation of the pupil, and a slight nervous shock, 
invariably precede and announce the supervention 
of the trance^ In table-tipping this shock occasions 
the slight tremor of the table before the manifesta- 
tions occur, and is frequently visible in slight con- 
vulsive jerkings of the medium's hands. The same 
shock precedes the supervention of the mesmeric 
trance. 

Another fact that I regard as conclusively estab- 
lished is that, although the trance supervenes at the 
will of the operator, it must always be preceded by 
a stage of incubation more or less prolonged, during 
which nervous hebetude is distinctly present, the op- 
erator is more or less taciturn and irritable, and the 
intellectual faculties are torpid. 

I once attended a series of seances given by a 
celebrated trance-medium, who insisted that my 
head was surrounded by a halo running through the 
whole spectrum of colors, that I had traveled for 
years in Syria, talked with the Arab in his tent, and 
whiffed my cigar with the Jew in his native Jeru- 
salem : not a word of which had any justification in 
fact, save a somewhat minute acquaintance with the 
Semitic languages and their literature, and a fervid 



SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS. 25 

sympathy with the type of mysticism the literature 
illustrates. 

This instance is a type of many. Indeed, in its 
more ordinary aspects, the mental impressions in 
clairvoyance invariably consist of the two elements, 
nervous perception and cerebration, in the same man- 
ner as impressions received through the media of the 
senses ; the only difference consisting in the fact that 
the former originate in a peripheral nervous aura. I 
shall not attempt to say that all the trances of spirit- 
ual mediums are so limited in their manner of receiv- 
ing impressions — for I am satisfied, from personal 
observation and from* physiological study, that there 
is a higher type of trance, that has its origin in the 
gray matter of the brain, and is more immediate in 
its processes. This, however, is but a cerebral stage 
of the same type of nervous perversion, and will be 
adverted to again by-and-by. What I wish to im- 
press on the reader's mind at this juncture is, that 
the peripheral aura, that produces the sensory phe- 
nomena of clairvoyance, independent of the media 
of the senses, is a symptom of nervous degeneracy ; 
that — to employ a medical term — it is an exponent 
of neurosis. 

Comparing, then, the series of psychical phenom- 
ena upon which spiritualism rests with the more pro- 
nounced series familiar to medical psychologists, from 
Esquirol to Maudsley and other living masters, the 
first observation of the student will be that a singu- 
lar parallelism exists between the two series ; that 
2 



26 METHOD OF INVESTIGATION, AND 

trance is the exponent of the latter equally with the 
former, and that the physical precursors of the trance 
incident to the latter series are invariably present in 
the former. If he is of an inquiring turn of mind, he 
will, at this stage, furnish himself with a microscope, 
and make a thorough study of nervous tissue, then ad- 
dress himself to the careful investigation of function. 
He will put himself to the pains to investigate the 
various phases of morbid function, particularly as 
relates to the nerve-centres, remembering always that 
one fact is worth fifty clever but unverified hypothe- 
ses, and that it is not advisable to have an opinion at 
all, unless the facts not only warrant but command 
it. Having pursued this course for a few years, he 
is competent to investigate the nature and relations 
of morbid psychical phenomena, and will long might- 
ily to dissect the cerebral and nervous organism of a 
spiritual medium, by way of determining its patho- 
logical condition. 

The point I wish to impress is, that of the three 
kindred groups of phenomena — that pertaining to 
mesmerism, the more pronounced group incident to 
spiritualism, and the still more interesting series illus- 
trated in morbid psychology — it is impossible thor- 
oughly to investigate the middle series without ex- 
amining the other two with equal thoroughness. It 
was his accurate and extensive acquaintance with 
morbid psychology, amassed by years of practical con- 
tact with nervous disorders, that enabled Dr. Mauds- 
ley, with unerring sagacity, to diagnose epilepsy as 



SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS. 27 

the cause of the trances of Swedenborg, and finally 
to collect and sift the facts of his visit to London in 
a manner to demonstrate the diagnosis. 

Prof. Crookes and Mr. A. R. "Wallace — the one 
not a physiologist, the other more attentive to struct- 
ure than to function — have erred, therefore, it seems 
to me, in having pursued an incorrect method of in- 
vestigation, and in neglecting to subject the physio- 
logical traits of mediums to the minutest scrutiny. 
The true method seems to me to be obvious. Here are 
so many persons — one in a thousand possibly — who 
are competent to produce certain phenomena. They 
are not persons of superior organization, physical or 
cerebral. Some of them, indeed, are of very low 
type physically and intellectually. The question 
for scientific inquiry, then, is not whether these 
phenomena involve the presumption of superhu- 
man intervention, but by what perversion of 
nervous function the medium is enabled to produce 
them. 

Now, to answer the conditions of the problem 
as a scientific one, any proposed explanation of the 
phenomena must put order of sequence and relation 
into the facts, protean as they are. It must demon- 
strate the agency by which they are produced, and 
indicate the special perversion of nervous function 
concerned in their production. Finally, it must lie 
within the circle of verifiable hypotheses, which, un- 
fortunately, is not the case with the psychic-force 
theory — a beautiful but romantic dream, having no 



28 METHOD OF INVESTIGATION, AND 

relation to the demonstrated laws of physics and 
physiology. 

In accordance with this method of investigation, 
the phenomena appear to me to present two very 
distinct series, seldom present in the same person, 
which I shall style respectively nervo-psychic and 
nervo-dynamic — meaning, under the former, to in- 
clude clairvoyance in its ordinary aspects, trance, 
prevision, presentiment, and the like ; under the lat- 
ter, table-tipping, rappings, levitation of bodies, writ- 
ing with phantom-hands, production of visible phan- 
toms from luminous clouds, and other feats involving 
the presumption of an invisible dynamic agency. 
That both series have the same etiology my memo- 
randa of cases will, I think, show beyond reasonable 
doubt. 

I have thus briefly indicated my own course of 
studies, pursued somewhat fitfully for the last ten 
years, and the method of investigation to which they 
have led, by way of preface to a series of conclusions 
that I shall state first, and verify afterward : 

1. That there is no pathological difference be- 
tween the trances of mediums, the induced trances 
of mesmerism, and the trances incident to epileptic 
and cataleptic attacks ; the three types equally in- 
volving reflex excitability of the gray matter of the 
brain, during partial suspension of the motor centres 
and, in catalepsy, of the medullary centres. The 
same sudden pallor and perceptible fading of the 
eye, with slight nervous shock, precede the super- 



SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS. 29 

vention of the fit, and the same exponent of heat in 
the coronal region of the cranium is more or less 
developed in all cases. 

2. That spirit-seeing, as illustrated in the cases 
of Judge Edmonds, A. J. Davis, Mrs. Woodhull, 
and mediums of that class, is a well-marked symp- 
tom of a single type of nervous and cerebral lesion ; 
which lesion is accompanied by a mental aura, dis- 
tinguished by a vague, generalizing tendency, and 
by morbid sensorial impressions, such as those of 
which the literature of spiritualism largely con- 
sists. 

3. That this lesion develops as one of its expo- 
nents a peculiar sensory and motor aura (or atmos- 
phere), which, entering into intimate molecular rela- 
tions and contact with surrounding objects within a 
circle of greater or less periphery, eventuates in the 
phenomenon of clairvoyance in cephalic, and of 
table-tipping, rappings, and the like, in vital tem- 
peraments. This law is constant and invariable. 
The nervo-dynamic series occur only in connection 
with mediums of strong vital temperament; the 
nervo-psychic mainly in connection with mediums in 
whom the cerebral predominates, and both in cases 
where the cerebral and the vital are more or less 
evenly balanced, but whose manifestations are ex- 
traordinary in neither. 

4. That this aura is of nervous origin, and con- 
sequent upon molecular disturbance of the nerve- 
centres developed by nervous disorder. That, as 



30 METHOD OF INVESTIGATION, AND 

such, it is more or less subject to the volition of the 
medium. 

5. That, in its motor aspect, this nervous atmos- 
phere is correlated with light, and susceptible of 
transformation into luminous clouds, into spectral 
apparitions, and other objective phenomena; and 
that the production of these phenomena constitutes 
a problem in nervo-molecular physics, to be investi- 
gated carefully, but having no ascertained relation 
to the higher spiritual aspects of human life. 

6. That in its sensory aspects it enters into inti- 
mate relations with nervous organisms surrounding 
it, is impressed with their thoughts at greater or less 
distance, transmits what they know or remember 
to the brain of the medium, and renders the organ- 
ism whence it proceeds en rapport with the minds 
of persons within the circle of its operations. 

7. That both groups of phenomena are, there- 
fore, morbid nervous phenomena, having their 
cause in nervous lesion, and their physiological basis 
in reflex excitability of the nerve-centres. 

8. That, therefore, there is no occasion to refer 
them to the operations of an hypothetical psychic 
force, nor to the intervention or agency of departed 
spirits. 

I state these propositions in detail before enter- 
ing upon memoranda of cases, in order that the 
reader may be enabled to apply them in the less im- 
portant instances, without special explanation. As 
Prof. Crookes remarks, it is obvious that a me- 



SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS. 31 

dium possesses something that is not possessed by 
ordinary men. Neither is it disputed, by those who 
have observed the phenomena, that, under certain 
conditions and within a limited distance from cer- 
tain persons of special nervous organization, a force 
operates by which, without muscular contact, action 
at a distance is caused, and visible motions and audi- 
ble sounds are produced in solid substances. As 
this force acts intelligently, Prof. Crookes and 
Sergeant Cox style it psychic force — or soul-force 
— and identify it with a psychic organism sup- 
posed to pervade and inhabit the material. Hence, 
in their terminology, a medium is designated as a 
psychic. 

Although this theory constitutes the scientific 
basis of spiritualism, a man may nevertheless ac- 
cept it, without accepting the cardinal tenet of the 
spiritualists, that the psychic is en rapport with the 
spirits of the dead. It is, on the other hand, illogi- 
cal and fragmentary to accept the latter and deny 
the former. 

Scientific progress — so far irom tending to over- 
turn a real religious faith — is gradually gathering 
the materials, the generalizations, let me say, for 
profounder conceptions of life and destiny, of re- 
ligion in the larger acceptation of the word, than 
the last century had. The great law of the correla- 
tion of forces — the same force always present in 
Nature, now actual, now potential, now heat, now 
light, now electricity, now nervous force, now men- 



32 METHOD OF INVESTIGATION, AND 

tal, but the same in all its transformations — opens 
new vistas for metaphysical dreamers. Alone, dis- 
connected from phenomena, of itself only, what is 
the substratum of this tremendous and universal 
energy ? This is the problem upon which, in its 
different aspects, every scientist labors — to the solu- 
tion of which every discovery tends. Analytically, it 
is a mere problem of molecular physics ; synthetically, 
it dips deep into the question of life and destiny ; 
and though, in the strictly empirical work of the 
experimentalist, the idea of teleology is excluded 
from science, vet in the hands of men like Herbert 
Spencer its teleological aspects have already assumed 
some prominence, and will presently eventuate in a 
new era of profoundly speculative inquiry. So this 
law of correlation, to the true thinker, asks, " What 
is the real?" No dreaming metaphysician, with 
his dialect of terms for airy nothings, ever put the 
question more pertinently or more directly ; and the 
psychic-force theory, it seems to me, while at war 
with the deeper aspects of this, according to Fara- 
day, the highest law in physical science, fails to 
answer the important question in a manner that 
commends itself to men of real scientific aptitude, 
and stultifies the tendency to deeper religious con- 
ceptions, now beginning to be felt as an active force 
in scientific thought. 

It is no doubt true, and can be established from 
caref ul comparison of ancient forms of civilization 
with modern, and of ancient types of the human 



SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS. 33 

race with modern, that there has been a general prog- 
ress toward more psychical types of organization, 
involving a greater complexity of emotional and in- 
tellectual life. The question is, whether the aver- 
age spiritual medium is an earnest of the advanced 
type potential in the existing ; and this question can 
only be answered by rigid physiological investiga- 
tion. 



III. 



CASES OF NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

This group includes a series of cases in winch 
the psychic element is predominant, with notes by 
the way, when necessary, and is selected with a 
view to cover the psychological phenomena associ- 
ated with spiritualism — first, with reference to their 
etiology, and, secondly, with reference to their nature 
and physiological exponents. In all instances not 
resting on accredited medical testimony, the facts 
have been carefully verified, and in the majority of 
instances they are stated on personal observation. 

Case I. — This case is, in many respects, analogous 
to that of Angelique Cottin, of popular notoriety 
in France about the year 1850, and described at 
length by Robert Dale Owen, in an article entitled 
" The Electric Girl of La Perriere," printed in the 
Atlantic Monthly for September, 1864. Though 
the dynamic element predominates, yet its impor- 
tant psychical aspects entitle it to a place in the ner- 
vo-psychic series. 

Mary Oarrick, an Irish girl, eighteen years of 
age, very ignorant, came to this country in May, 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 35 

1867. Had been subject to fits of somnambulism. 
Immediately upon her arrival she was engaged as a 
servant in a very respectable family in a large ISTew- 
England town, appeared to be in good health, and 
performed the duties required of her in a satis- 
factory manner. She seldom left the house, and 
was totally unacquainted with the subject of spirit- 
ualism. 

She had lived in this family about six weeks, 
when, on the 3d day of July, 1867, the bells com- 
municating with the outside door and with the 
various apartments in the house commenced ringing 
unaccountably. The phenomenon was at first at- 
tributed to rats tampering with the wires, but ex- 
amination proved this to be impossible. The bells 
were next isolated, but the ringing did not cease. 
They hung near the ceiling in the room where 
Mary worked, and were fully ten feet from the 
floor, and never rang unless the girl was in the 
room or in the apartment adjoining, but were often 
seen to be agitated and heard to ring when different 
members of the family were present. The ringing 
did not consist of a single stroke of one or more of 
the bells, but was the consequence of a violent agita- 
tion of them all, as if shaken by a sudden gust of 
wind. 

A few days after this commenced, frequent loud 
and startling raps, on the walls, doors, or windows of 
the room where Mary worked, began to be heard. 
These noises were similar to those ordinarily pro- 



36 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

duced by a smart tap of the knuckles on an article 
of wood, and were heard by all the members of 
the family and many others. They increased in fre- 
quency from day to day, until the girl became ex- 
cited and at night raved in her sleep, and followed 
her from room to room. On several occasions they 
were heard at night in her bedroom, and, upon going 
there, it was ascertained that she was sound asleep. 

About three weeks later, a series of still more 
extraordinary phenomena commenced. Sofas were 
upset, crockery fell to the floor, tables lifted and 
moved about the room, cooking-utensils were hurled 
from one point to another. No special record of 
these occurrences was kept for some days; but at 
length a journal of observations was instituted. 

August 5th. — As Mary was washing, a low table, 
laden with two large tubs of water, was suddenly 
moved ; and the lid of the wash-boiler, which was a 
copper one, was repeatedly lifted and dropped when 
the girl was at some distance from it. These phe- 
nomena were observed by several members of the 
family. 

August 6th. — As Mary was ironing, the table 
was repeatedly lifted. Upon taking her work to an- 
other table, the phenomenon was repeated, and her 
flat-iron, which she left for a moment, was thrown 
to the floor. The table was lifted in this way at 
moments when she was several feet from it, and 
when laden with a weight of several hundred pounds. 
The cover of the wood-box and that of the wash- 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 37 

boiler were also constantly slamming ; and a heavy 
soapstone-slab, weighing forty pounds, which formed 
the top of a case of drawers, was repeatedly lifted 
and dropped. On the afternoon of the same day, as 
the girl was putting away the tea-things, and about 
to place a metallic tray filled with dishes upon this 
slab, it was suddenly lifted, and knocked the tray 
from her hands. This was witnessed by the family, 
and frequently occurred afterward. 

August 20th. — The table movements occurred 
frequently, and a large basket filled with clothes was 
hurled to the floor. A small board, used for scour- 
ing knives, was also thrown across the room, and the 
doors were constantly slammed. 

August 2oth. — The soapstone-slab was lifted re- 
peatedly within an hour. At last it suddenly lift- 
ed, fell with great force, and was broken in two 
through the middle, Mary being in the act of wring- 
ing out the dishcloth. A few minutes later one-half 
of the broken slab was thrown to the floor and 
dashed in pieces. This stone, it should be added, 
had a few days before been taken from its place and 
laid upon the floor in an adjoining room, with a 
heavy bucket upon it ; but, as the movements were 
not abated, it was replaced and fastened down with 
strong wooden clamps, which were forcibly torn 
away. Another soapstone-slab, in which the copper 
boiler was set, and which had become loosened from 
the brickwork, was split and thrown to the floor in 
a similar manner. A fragment of it was also hurled 



38 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

from the wash-room to the room adjoining. A 
wooden table standing against the wall often started 
out into the room, and was on one occasion upset. 

August 26th and 27th, — The rappings were par- 
ticularly frequent and vigorous ; movables were 
thrown about, and a large wash-tub, filled with 
clothes soaking, was hurled from the wash-form to 
the floor and upset. A stool, having a pail of water 
on it, moved along the floor, and a porcelain kettle 
was lifted and dropped. The furniture in the room 
was also considerably agitated. On the evening of 
August 27th the girl was sent away for two days, 
and the manifestations ceased. 

August 29th. — Mary returned, and reported that 
she had not been troubled during her absence ; but, 
within two hours after, the demonstrations com- 
menced again and continued for two weeks. 

September 12th. — A violent hysteriform attack 
supervened and lasted for two hours, during which 
the girl was unconscious and could be restrained 
only by the united strength of several attendants. 
The paroxysm subsiding, she slept quietly till morn- 
ing. The paroxysms recurred at intervals of two 
days, but without loss of consciousness, and were 
marked by no peculiar symptoms, except a distress- 
ing sensation at the base of the brain. She alsc 
complained that she heard strange noises, and be- 
came subject to severe paroxysms of bleeding at the 
nose. 

September 18th. — The girl was sent to the asylum, 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 39 

no rappings or other phenomena having occurred 
since the date of the first hysteriform fit. 

At the end of the third week she was pronounced 
able to resume her work, and returned in a very 
happy frame of mind, though subject to sudden 
starts. But the phenomena did not occur again, and 
she continued comparatively calm for nearly two 
months, grew very fleshy, and was learning to read 
and write with considerable rapidity. 

November 28th. — At night an attack of somnam- 
bulism supervened ; she got up and dressed herself, 
went to the room of her mistress, and asked permis- 
sion to clean the windows. She remembered noth- 
ing of this in the morning. These paroxysms oc- 
curred nightly for five consecutive nights, when they 
were replaced by hysteriform attacks, occurring 
periodically at the same hour. She was again re- 
moved to the asylum, where she was afterward 
employed as house-maid. 

Certain symptoms worth noting accompanied the 
phenomena in their later stages, among them attacks 
of lethargy bordering on trance. Loud playing on 
the organ made her so sleepy that slumber soon 
supervened ; but so long as the playing was soft she 
was wakeful. At night in her sleep she would sing 
for hours, although she had never been heard to 
sing in the daytime. 

It should be added, also, that soon after her som- 
nambulism developed itself she became clairvoyant. 
One remarkable instance of her clairvoyance was 



40 NERYO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

verified. She declared that a young lady, one of 
the members of the family, then on a visit to a dis- 
tant city, was very sick, and was exceedingly dis- 
tressed about it, notwithstanding the assurance of 
the family that the young lady had just been heard 
from and was quite well. She would not be com- 
forted, however, and still declared that the absent 
lady was very ill and suffered extremely from a bad 
sore on her hand. This afterward proved to be ex- 
actly as she had stated. 

In this remarkable case several points, aside from 
its general bearing, should be noted particularly. 

In the first place, the phenomena were noticed 
to occur at moments when the girl was engaged in 
heavy work, calling for considerable outlay of physi- 
cal strength, and a corresponding emphasis of voli- 
tion. The soapstone-slab was broken, for example, 
while she was wringing out the dishcloth. 

Secondly, at a later stage of the disorder they 
w^ere replaced by hysteriform attacks, while the 
latter were finally replaced by fits of somnambulism 
and by the half -trance of clairvoyance. 

Thirdly, these attacks had the stated periodicity 
incident to epileptic paroxysms, of which somnam- 
bulism is frequently the precursor. 

Fourthly, in common with lesions involving 
trance, pains and soreness at the base of the brain 
indicated disorder of the medullary centres. 

Case II. — D. C. Densmore, of Boston, Mass., by 
profession a sea-captain, became subject in 1822 to 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 41 

the consciousness of being attended in all his move- 
ments by invisible intelligences, which assisted him 
at crises in his studies and business. Frequently, 
when in doubt as to what course to pursue, he has 
been directed by a voice that speaks in distinct 
words, as one man would speak to another. At a 
later period he became subject to attacks, during 
which he wrote automatically, and this was soon fol- 
lowed by clairvoyance, and by the gift of healing 
by the laying on of hands. This power of healing 
seemed to be wholly independent of volition. He 
gives many verifiable instances of cures worked in 
this way, and believes that the gift emanates from 
spirit-guides having control of his organism. 

In 1843-' 44, Mr. Densmore was master of the 
ship Massasoit, of Bath, Maine, on a whaling- voyage 
to the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and on 
his passage home arrived on the coast February 1, 
1844. Deciding to pass between Nantucket and the 
Georges shoals, to save pilotage through the Yine- 
yard Sound, and having made only twenty-four 
miles northing for the whole month of February, 
owing to constant gales from the northeast, he 
found the ship one day at noon in nine fathoms of 
water, and drifting directly on the shoals. As the 
water lessened about a fathom a mile, and they were 
drifting a mile an hour, he concluded that the vessel 
must strike about four o'clock that afternoon. He 
had made several ineffectual attempts to head the 
ship round, so as to drift parallel with the shoals, 



42 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

and liad lost all liis available head-sails, excepting an 
old fore-staysail, with, which and the weather-clew 
of the reefed foresail he hoped to succeed ; but the 
former was scarcely hoisted when it went into rib- 
bons, the latter following. This baffled the last 
hope of being able to tack about, and there was 
nothing but to wait for doom, which, unless the 
wind shifted, was sure and soon. 

Captain Densmore retained the lead in his pos- 
session, now and then taking the depth of water, and 
kept the officers and crew in ignorance of the real 
state of affairs, in order to prevent demoralization 
and save the ship if an opportunity should be offered. 
At a little past three o'clock the cast of the lead 
showed six fathoms of water, and Captain Densmore 
went to his cabin, trying, he says, to feel very 
solemn, but quite unable to appreciate the situation. 
There he sat and thought for a few minutes, and 
finally determined to advise the officers and crew of 
the danger, as the minutes were not many between 
them and death. He went on deck, never calmer 
in his life, and was just about to tell the officers how 
imminent the peril was, when a voice, distinct above 
the raging elements, said : 

" Wear ship." 

He immediately answered, as though a human 
voice had spoken to him : 

" I can't wear ship ; I haven't any sails." 

" Make a sail of the men ; man the weather fore- 
rigging with the men," was the mysterious answer. 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 43 

The practicability of doing so flashed upon him 
in an instant, and, instead of setting the men to 
praying, he called them aft, told them what he 
wanted in a few words, and they all scampered for- 
ward, joking at being made into a storm-sail. The 
captain now lashed himself to the wheel, and, as soon 
as the men were all in the rigging, rolled the wheel 
hard up, when the ship began to fall off, and in a 
few minutes had fairly headed about. Neither wind 
nor sea abated at all until after seven o'clock. 

Captain Densmore attributes the saving of the 
ship and of the lives of thirty-four men wholly to 
the interposition of the voice that he habitually 
hears at such crises. 

He has heard these voices frequently, but only 
on occasions of imminent peril. 

For example, on another occasion, when making 
the passage of the South Atlantic, the ship got short 
of provisions, and they were making the most of 
every breath of wind to get home. One night, after 
a scanty supper, Captain Densmore went on deck, 
the ship making not more than two knots an hour, 
and the sea as smooth as a pond. He sauntered 
along the waist of the ship, and stood leaning on 
the weather-rail. Directly he heard a voice say : 

" Take in sail. 55 

Captain Densmore scanned the horizon low down 
and overhead, but not a cloud was visible. The sun 
was just setting. 

He felt uneasy and wanted to follow the prompt- 



44 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

ing of the voice, but could find no excuse for doing 
so, and did not wish to tell the mate his only reason 
for such a proceeding ; as they were using the ut- 
most available expedition to shorten the distance 
between them and home, and the officers and men 
would certainly regard him as insane to give an 
order that would cause needless delay. 

He leaned over the weather-rail and scanned the 
sunset until the lurid disk had dipped beneath the 
sea. Presently, brassy streaks shot up beyond the 
horizon higher and higher, as the sun dropped lower 
down. Captain Densmore turned and looked to lee- 
ward, and noticed that the brassy haze had already 
crept all along the lee-horizon. On this he decided, 
and told the mate to call up the men and take in 
sail. The mate went forward, growling. " Hadn't 
you better send down the top-gallant yards and 
masts?" slurred the old salt in undertone, but he 
obeyed. "Is the old man crazy?" grumbled the 
men, but they, too, obeyed. 

Scarcely had all the light sails been furled, the 
courses clewed up, and the rigging hauled out pre- 
paratory to reefing, when a terrible tornado struck 
the ship, and the masts swayed like saplings and 
threatened to come down. The wind struck the 
vessel at five in the afternoon, and for eleven hours 
she was almost on her beam-ends. This was off Cape 
Hatteras, where so many have gone down. 

Another incident must suffice. One morning, 
about five weeks after the tornado, they sighted a 



NERV0-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 45 

full-rigged brig to windward. The wind was light, 
yet the brig was under close-reefed topsails. Cap- 
tain Densmore went on board to procure provisions. 
The vessel proved to be the President, of Portland, 
Maine, Captain Sargent. By observation at twelve, 
Highland Light on Cape Cod bore west-northwest 
fifty-four miles ; the wind was light from the north- 
ward. They were now heading off-shore. When 
Captain Densmore left the brig, Captain Sargent 
asked which way he was going to stand. 

" In-shore," answered Captain Densmore. 

" Then you'll be ashore on Cape Cod in less 
than twenty-four hours," replied Sargent. " Stand 
off ! There's going to be a terrible northeaster ; 
I've been looking for it for two days, and now the 
indications are that it will be here before night." 

And, to make his argument more effective : " I 
have been in the "West India trade twenty-two years, 
at all seasons of the year, and have never lost a 
studding-sail boom." 

As Captain Sargent was an experienced pilot on 
the coast, Densmore concluded to follow his advice, 
and gave the order to brace forward and stand off- 
shore ; but scarcely had it been executed, when he 
heard a voice say distinctly : 

"Tack ship." 

He obeyed without a moment's hesitation and 
headed directly for Cape Cod ; but, as they neared 
the land, at 4 p. m., the wind veered round, and the 
next morning they passed Seguin Light at the en- 



46 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

trance of the Kennebec Eiver. The President was 
blown twice to the southward of the gulf, and, 
after six weeks' beating about, finally went ashore 
on Monomoy Point, Cape Cod, and was lost. 

It should be observed that the progress of this 
case presents in the course of its thirty years all the 
successive stages of larvated epilepsy, from its pre- 
cursory consciousness of attending intelligences to 
clairvoyance, about which are grouped some of the 
most remarkable psychic phenomena known to med- 
ical men. Mr. Densmore is of cerebro-vital tem- 
perament, has been subject to nervous attacks from 
a boy, and inherits an epileptic predisposition. 

Case III. — Andrew Jackson Davis, born at 
Blooming Grove, New York, August 11, 1826, is of 
slender physique and of cephalic temperament. In 
1843, at the age of seventeen, he was subjected to 
mesmeric experiments by William Levingston, once 
well known as an exponent of mesmerism. In 
1844 he became subject to spontaneous attacks of 
trance, in one of which he lay for sixteen hours. 
In these cerebral attacks he converses with invisible 
beings, and describes the scenery and constitution of 
the spirit-world ; but of late years his nervous sys- 
tem has in some degree recovered its tone, and the 
attacks have supervened less frequently. 

Case IV. — Mary , born in Paris, France, 

and eleven years of age June 26, 1873. Has lived 
in this country eight years. In conversation ex- 
hibits uncommon intensity of mental action and 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 47 

uncommon vividness of mental vision. In addition 
to her native tongue, she speaks German and Eng- 
lish with singular fluency. For several years previous 
to the attack described in the following paragraphs, 
Mary had occasionally complained that she saw 
about her the forms of persons who were dead, and, 
as there could be no reasonable doubt of her sin- 
cerity, the fact gave her parents considerable uneasi- 
ness. 

During the summer of 1873 her health appeared 
to be gradually failing, and one day, about the iirst 
of December, she startled her mother by telling her 
that she saw her dead sister Louise, who had come 
near her in an angel-form and told her she would 
make her well, so that she would never be sick any 
more. Her mother tried to induce her to dismiss 
the subject, but she seemed unable to stop talking, 
and kept on describing her sister, who, she said, was 
dressed in pure white, her face bright and shining, 
her hair illumined with light, and golden dew-drops 
dripping from her wings. She also saw her dead 
brother ; but, while talking, her strength failed, and 
she sank down, as in death. 

It was about ten o'clock in the morning when 
this apparent death occurred, but, her parents sup- 
posing she was already dead, no physician was called, 
and preparations were commenced for the funeral. 
The body was, however, kept until the following 
afternoon at four o'clock, when, taking a final look 
of the remains, the coffin-lid was sealed, and the 



48 NERYO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

coffin was placed in the hearse. The procession 
now started for the grave. 

They had proceeded but a little distance when 
the quick ear. of the mother caught the sound of a 
muffled but familiar cry, and she expressed a sus- 
picion that it came from the coffin of little Mary. 
Her suspicion was overruled, and the procession 
trundled on. But in a few minutes another cry was 
heard. The hearse was now stopped, and the coffin 
withdrawn. The struggles of the supposed dead 
could be distinctly heard after the door of the 
hearse was opened, and, on opening the coffin, little 
Mary was found alive, having in her struggles torn 
away parts of her death-robe. She was taken from 
the coffin, conveyed home, and placed in a vinegar- 
bath ; recovered rapidly, and was soon as well as ever. 

After her recovery, she stated that she could 
hear and feel during her trance, but was unable to 
move a hand or make the slightest stir. She knew 
when they dressed her for the grave, when she was 
laid in the coffin, and heard them fasten down the 
lid, but was powerless to stir until she had been 
carried some distance in the hearse, the motion of 
w T hich, slow and rhythmical, probably resuscitated 
her. She described, with singular enthusiasm and 
beauty of diction, the beatific beings she saw while 
entranced, and appeared, for some months, to recur 
to them periodically, though her parents spared no 
pains to divert her mind from the terrible episode. 

Romantic as this case may seem to the general 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 49 

reader, the scientific will discern in it a very simple 
and ordinary attack of catalepsy, heralded by the 
usual prodromata of cataleptic trance, nervous per- 
turbation, and a consciousness of being environed by 
spiritual intelligences. 

Case V. — John Worth Edmonds, born in 1798, 
at Hudson, New York ; graduated at Union College 
in 1816 ; of cephalic temperament. In 1851, after 
spending twenty-five years, in unremitting profes- 
sional work, and rising to the dignity of judge of 
the Supreme Court of the State of New York, his 
health gave way, and persistent mental depression 
supervened. His disorder took the form of an al- 
most monomaniac persistency in discussing the sub- 
ject of death and future destiny. In this frame of 
mind, and with this predisposition, he spent months 
in experimenting on the phenomena of spiritualism 
and recording his memoranda, which he afterward 
published in book-form. 

Soon after he became a medium, while reading 
in bed one evening, he began to feel the intangible 
pressure of spirit-hands and to hear rappings. A 
little later he became impressed with the notion that 
he must call on a certain man, personally unknown 
to him, and receive a spiritual communication of a 
higher order than he had hitherto experienced. He 
went, and received what he firmly believed to be a 
message from a dead friend. He often averred that 
he saw spirits about him while he was delivering ju- 
dicial decisions. 
3 



50 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

He went to Central America soon after he was 
developed as a medium ; and the members of his 
circle, on his return, professing to have been kept 
miraculously advised of the events of his voyage, 
simultaneously with their occurrence, he verified 
their memoranda by comparing them day by clay 
with the records of his diary. This coincidence he 
was accustomed to relate as proof of the soundness 
of his belief. Nor was this all. He was, during 
the same year, spiritually notified of the illness of 
his grandson in Canada, and of the death of his 
friend Isaac C. Hopper. He foretold the destruc- 
tion of the ill-fated steamer Henry Clay, and was 
frequently warned against perfidious associates and 
advised of impending evils. His daughter also be- 
came a medium, delivering messages in languages of 
which she professed to know nothing out of the 
trance-state. 

"My father had been dead thirty-six years,'* 5 
says the judge, describing one of his midnight 
visions, " and he and Mr. Yan Buren had been 
friends for life. When I first saw their spirits, my 
father w^as standing in the middle of the room, on 
my left. He had an alert look, and was very easy 
and unconstrained in his attitude. Mr. Van Buren 
stood against the wall on my right, near me, and six 
or eight paces from my father. He had a puzzled 
look, as if he did not exactly comprehend his con- 
dition. He knew me and my father — knew that my 
father was dead, that he also was dead, and that I 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 51 

was not. I did not observe what first took place 
between them. My attention was first particularly 
attracted to them by hearing Mr. Van Buren say : 
' I don't understand this ; I know I am dead, but I 
am the same as I was before. I am on earth yet. 
There are my family, my home, my country ; and 
the matters that interested me in life are just as 
near me as ever, yet removed from me. Can this 
be the death I have thought of so long, and is this 
to be my life after death forever % ' This thought 
seemed to goad him into action. Tie turned to the 
right, and, bending down, began to pluck at some- 
thing, as if removing weeds from his path ; and 
thus he slowly worked his way from me." 

Judge Edmonds wrote voluminously at this early 
period, with Bacon and Swedenborg, Yan Buren 
and Washington, as his attendant spirits. 

One of his latest utterances consisted of a com- 
munication from the late Judge Peckham, describing 
the Ville du Havre disaster. 

Let the reader note that, in this case, the phe- 
nomena associated with spiritualism supervened after 
a- considerable period of nervous depression, accom- 
panied with indications of physical debility — the 
initial symptoms of a nervous disorder that rendered 
his after-years so many cycles of suffering, and en- 
gendered an intellectual aura, that, without percepti- 
bly impairing his faculties, fatally determined their 
direction. 

Case VI. — A. B. Crandall, of slender physique 



52 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

and cephalic temperament, states that premonitory 
dreams have, from boyhood, played an important 
part in his psychical life ; but it was not until 1852 
that he began to pay special attention to these phe- 
nomena. He was resident in a remote district in the 
West, isolated from early associations, twenty leagues 
from a post-office, and sixty from the nearest rail- 
way-station. Then began a series of dreams, fore- 
shadowing the future in a manner so remarkable as 
to enforce his attention; and for ten years there 
was not a single instance in which dreaming of 
walking and talking with a person who had died 
many years before did not herald the reception of 
news from home. " One day," says Mr. Crandall, 
" meeting an old friend, who had a son on the bor- 
der of the Indian Territory, he astonished me by 
remarking : ' Crandall, I am going to hear from 
James to-day, for I had a long talk with your dead 
brother last night, and I have never known the 
omen to fail me.' About three hours later the let- 
ter came." 

Case VII. — This case rests upon the authority 
of Mr. Macnish, author of "The Philosophy of 
Sleep." A young man, whose father was dead, 
was in danger of losing a very important suit for 
want of evidence, proving a certain transaction on 
the part of his father, the papers to which had been 
lost. The case was to come on the following day, 
and, having exhausted all means of exhuming the 
facts he wanted, the young man went to bed in de- 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMONA. 53 

spair, and, after thinking long, fell asleep. He had 
just a single flash of dream, during which his father 
appeared standing by the bed, and told him to visit 
a certain barrister, who had long since given up 
business, but who had conducted the negotiations, 
and was cognizant of the whole transaction. The 
apparition vanished sub umbras, but, on visiting the 
old barrister the next morning, the evidence re- 
quired was completed link by link, and the cause 
was won. 

Mr. Macnish thinks the father must have told 
his son, at some date previous to his death, the de- 
tails of the transaction, and that what he had so 
thoroughly forgotten as to imagine that he had never 
known it, must have come to him in his sleep. But 
in the light of facts bearing upon the important 
part that ante-natal impressions play in certain states 
of consciousness, this hypothesis is unnecessary. In 
certain abnormal and highly-excited states of the 
nervous system, as is proved by abundant facts, mat- 
ters impressed upon the memory of a father present 
themselves to the consciousness of his posterity. I 
have no doubt, for instance, that the daughter of 
Judge Edmonds derives her capacity to speak, in 
the trance-state, in languages unfamiliar to her in 
the ordinary moods of consciousness, from her fa- 
ther's studies in that direction, or rather, from the 
nervous habit engendered by those studies — for in- 
vestigation has left no question that memory is an 
organic record, and that every event and idea of a 



54 NERVO-PSYCEIC PHENOMENA. 

man's life is distinctly recorded in his nervous or- 
ganism, and hence transmissible. 

Case YIII. — This case illustrates the position 
taken in the preceding paragraph, and rests upon 
the authority of the London Lancet. Dr. F. May- 
hew, of Glastonbury, England, writing to the 1873 
volume of that journal, says that there is now living 
in a village in the vicinity of that town one Eli 

H , aged seventy-five. Before he was born his 

father made a vow that if his wife, then pregnant, 
should bring him a girl, she having had three in suc- 
cession, he would never speak to the baby as long 
as he lived. The issue was a boy ; but, what is most 
remarkable, this boy would never speak to his 
father, and, during his father's lifetime, was never 
known to speak to anybody except his mother and 
his three sisters. The father died when the son 
was thirty-five years old, since which he has been 
possessed of the normal faculty of articulation. 

Dr. J. "W. Eastment, of "VVincanton, who w^as 
born in the village where dumb Eli lived, remarks, 
in writing to the Lancet, that the afflicted father 
would often entreat his son to talk with him, but 
that neither entreaties nor threats, to say nothing of 
promises, were of the least avail. The father even 
offered him half his property, if he would but once 
speak to him — but all to no purpose. The mother 
also admonished the son, and begged him to talk to 
his father, but his reply invariably was : " Mother, 
I would talk to father if I could, but the moment 



NERYO-PSYCIIIC PHENOMENA. 55 

he comes near me my voice begins to falter and I 
can't say a word." 

" The facts of this case," says Dr. Mayhew, " are 
indeed unexplainable on ordinary principles. My 
appeal is, to the more than ordinary acquaintance 
with psychological phenomena possessed by readers 
of the leading medical journals." 

Case IX. 3 — This case, of a young lady of Ger- 
man parentage, resident in New Haven, Connecticut, 
and subject to cataleptic attacks, is still more directly 
in point. Her parents have been residents of this 
country for many years. German is not and has 
not been spoken in the family, and the cataleptic is 
unacquainted with it. Yet, in her trances, she talks 
German habitually, and with the unhesitating fa- 
cility of a native. 

Case X. — The case of the boy murderer, of 

1 Cases, in which abnormal nervous excitation has wholly trans- 
formed the action of the nerve-centre coordinating the muscles con- 
cerned in articulation, are by no means so uncommon as is generally 
supposed. July 30, 1872, Miss Margaret Kelley, until that date hi 
apparently healthy condition, was stricken with cerebral disorder, 
one of the exponents of which was a total forgetfulness of English, 
her native tongue, and considerable fluency and command of Ger- 
man, which she had never studied nor heard spoken to any great ex- 
tent. Several months after this stroke, Miss Kelley apparently re- 
covered from the attack, and conversed intelligently in German, but 
could neither speak English nor understand it without an interpreter. 
The explanation of these phenomena in cerebral disorders lies, no 
doubt, in the fact that the nerve-centre concerned in them is situated 
in the left anterior lobe of the cerebrum, and hence participates in 
the morbid condition of the great intellectual centres grouped about it. 



56 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

Boston, Jesse R. Pomeroy, known as the boy with 
the white eye, inexplicable as it seems, also strikingly 
illustrates how the nervous impressions of a father 
may reappear in his posterity. At periodical inter- 
vals, the boy is possessed of a morbid impulse to 
mutilate and torture, or cut the throats of his play- 
mates, and has already committed several murders. 
His mother denies the current story that, during 
pregnancy, she was in the habit of going to the 
slaughter-house, where her husband was employed, 
to witness the killing of animals, or that she ever 
did so at all, and states that Jesse exhibited no ab- 
normal impulses until after he was vaccinated ; and, 
from personal examination of the case, I am inclined 
to credit her story so far as both assertions are con- 
cerned. It appears, from minute inquiry into the 
habits and antecedents of the father, that he had 
been subject to nervous paroxysms at different peri- 
ods for many years, and that the boy, Jesse, in- 
herited a neurotic tendency, w^hich would, in the na- 
ture of things, have manifested itself in some form. 
This tendency may have been, and probably was, im- 
mediately developed by the ulceration and illness 
consequent upon vaccination : where the morbid ten- 
dency exists, but might lie dormant for years, it is 
frequently brought to the surface in this way, or by 
phthisis : but it descended directly from the pater- 
nal ancestor. The special direction taken by the 
morbid impulse in Jesse's case was, however, no 
doubt determined by the business in which the elder 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 57 

Pomeroy was employed at and before the date of 
his birth, or, in other words, by the habit of mutila- 
tion, contracted by his father in the slaughter-house, 
which, like all habits, primarily impressed the ner- 
vous system, and was recorded in the nervous or- 
ganism as a transmissible bias, to present itself in 
the instance of his son as a monomania, coming to 
the surface only in the periodical paroxysms of ner- 
vous disorder, but always existing as a latent ten- 
dency. The medical observer finds here, therefore, 
a singular instance of the manner' in which mere 
customary action on the part of a progenitor recurs 
in the case of the son as a psychic phenomenon. 

Case XI. — Victoria Claflin, generally known as 
Mrs. Woodhull, native of Homer, Ohio, and born 
September 23, 1838 ; of slender physique and ce- 
phalic temperament ; subject from girlhood to cere- 
bral attacks (trances), in which she converses with 
spirits, and presents physically and psychically, with 
' marked emphasis, the usual exponents and symp- 
toms of larvated epilepsy. With the unmistakable 
mental aura incident, to this type of nervous lesion, 
her attacks follow the more or less stated periodic- 
ity associated with it, and generally last from one to 
two hours, during which she talks incessantly. 

At thirty years of age, at the bidding of De- 
mosthenes, Mrs. Woodhull appeared in New York 
in the year 1868, and first settled at "No. 17 Great 
Jones Street, using the clairvoyance, incident to ner- 
vous lesion of this type, as a means of support. 



58 NERYO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

One dramatic incident in her career is worth re- 
peating as an illustration of the strange mental aura, 
approximating to insanity, that habitually controls 
her. One day, while her son was very ill, she left 
him to make her usual round of medical visits, and 
on her return was startled with the tidings that the 
boy had been dead two hours. " No," she said, " I 
will not permit his death ! " and with frantic energy 
she caught him to her bared bosom, and glided in- 
sensibly into trance, in which she remained for several 
hours. When she awoke, still holding the boy to 
her bosom, a perspiration suffused his clammy skin, 
and he, the supposed dead, had come back to life — 
and still lives in a kind of lethargy, the victim of 
an inherited nervous degeneration, that no skill can 
arrest. 

In her periodical trances, and as the exponent of 
an advanced stage of nervous disorder, it should be 
observed that Mrs. Woodhull develops visibly that 
correlation of nerve-aura with light playing about 
the head so frequently noticed in larvated attacks. 
Indeed, in all its aspects, her case is typically illus- 
trative of the nervous and psychical phenomena 
never absent, but seldom present in emphasis so 
marked, in mediums of the trance-class. 

Case XII. — Mrs. Eussell, of Stafford, Connecti- 
cut, sees and converses with spirits, and hears noc- 
turnal voices. Is over forty years of age, and has 
been subject to these phenomena for many years ; 
of cephalic temperament, and considerably debili- 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 59 

tated. On examination, I find that her attacks 
are subject to the periodicity, and present the faded 
eye, facial pallor, and slight secousses of the mus- 
cles, incident to the cerebral type of the epileptic 
malady. 

Case XIII. — This case, condensed from the re- 
port of a commission of medical men, appointed to 
investigate and report on the nature of certain 
psychological phenomena associated with mesmer- 
ism, proves that epileptic convulsions may be re- 
placed by trance, and that the latter may replace the 
fit so fully as to call for the periodical stage of incu- 
bation, ere repetition can supervene. 

Pierre Cazot, of epileptic parentage, was received 
into one of the Paris hospitals, and some experi- 
ments were instituted at the instance of M. Foissac. 
The convulsions yielded readily to the usual passes, 
and Cazot was thrown into mesmeric slumber, during 
which, in answer to questions from members of the 
committee, he stated the hour and minute when his 
next attack would occur — which was verified to the 
moment. The experiments covered an interval of 
six months, the transformation of the convulsions 
into the larvated form invariably supervening under 
the manipulations of M. Foissac, and Cazot re- 
peatedly foretelling the day and hour and minute 
when his next attack would supervene. These pre- 
dictions, with a single exception, in which the varia- 
tion was about five minutes, were fulfilled to the 
instant. 



60 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

On two occasions, when M. Foissac had been 
introduced into the house surreptitiously, and was 
seated in an adjoining room, Cazot detected his 
presence, remarked that he was very sleepy, and was, 
within ten minutes, lapped in mesmeric slumber. 
At the last experiment, he stated to the commission 
that in his next attack he should be mad for clays, 
and that after that no fits would occur ; but, before 
the expiration of the predicted period, he was acci- 
dentally ridden down on the street, and died of the 
injuries received. 

The committee, in reporting, detail the facts at 
length, but are coincident in the opinion that Cazot's 
prevision was limited to his disorder. It should be 
stated, also, that, when he emerged from the attack, 
he was at each experiment ascertained to have been 
unconscious that any questions had been put to him, 
or that he had uttered any predictions. 

Case XIV.— M. Cazotte, the author of "Le 
Diable Amoureux," was a mild and amiable man, 
but unfortunately infatuated with the reveries of 
the Illuminati. It was the year before the Revolu- 
tion broke out in Trance, but its shadow had already 
fallen upon the popular consciousness, and the brassy 
streaks that portend the tornado were already visi- 
ble low down in the horizon. La Harpe tells the 
story in his own dramatic way : 

It was a dinner at the Academy, and a brilliant 
gathering of the celebrities of literature, the law, 
art, science, and fashion, were present — the ladies of 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 61 

the land among them ; a splendid festival, at which 
ladies of the high degree of Madame de Grammont 
blushed not behind their fans. Condorcet and all 
his set were there. They sang songs, and quoted 
from " La Pucelle." One and one only of the as- 
sembled revelers sat apart in musing mood, and 
recked not the storm of jests. This was M. Cazotte, 
who at last, in dreamy reply to brilliant anticipations 
of the Revolution, then the golden age, broke in 
upon the tempest of talk. 

" Yes, gentlemen," said Cazotte ; " yes, ladies "— 
for a Parisian, even in the throes of prophecy, is too 
courteous to forget the ladies — " you will all live to 
see it."' 

" It needs no prophet's vision to see that," 
sneered one of the elegancies of the new intel- 
lectual era." 

" Perhaps not," rejoined M. Cazotte, dreamily ; 
" but you will, perhaps, agree that it requires more 
than mere guessing to tell what I am about to say 
to you." And, going on in his dreamy way, M. 
Cazotte foretells the death of those present, one 
after another — a dismal picture of men gashing 
themselves with razors, strangling themselves with 
nooses (any way to die) ; lords and ladies, and Ma- 
dame de Grammont among them, riding to the guil- 
lotine in carts. 

The guests laughed dismally. It was a joke, 
they said ; but then, M. Cazotte's wit had always 
had an affiliation for the dismal. The host even in- 



/ 



62 NERVO-PSYOHIC PHENOMENA. 

timated that the fun had been carried far enough ; 
and M. Cazotte was just taking his leave, when 
Madame de Grammont interposed. 

" But good M. Cazotte has not forecast his own 
destiny," said she, playfully, though with a little 
shudder, perhaps. 

And, for reply, the prophet told the story of the 
Jew who walked thrice round Jerusalem. 

Making all deductions for historical decoration 
in general, and for the attitudinizing of Celtic his- 
torians in particular, the story of M. Cazotte is 
typical of a class of morbid psychic phenomena sel- 
dom observed in general society, but tolerably famil- 
iar to psychological physicians. It need only be 
added that M. Cazotte had long been subject to peri- 
odical cerebral attacks — as, indeed, Dr. Maudsley, 
England's foremost alienist, has proved Sweden- 
borg to have been, from the records of his visit to 
London. 

Case XV. — Emma L , of cephalic tempera- 
ment, uneducated, incapable of physical exertion, and 
subject to nervous disturbances, at eighteen years of 
age contracted the habit of inducing trance with 
sulphuric ether, and continued the practice until a 
whiff of the angesthetic sufficed to produce the phe- 
nomenon. The experiments in this case covered an 
interval of two years, and were instituted by sub- 
stituting mesmeric passes for the action of the drug. 
During the progress of these experiments Miss 
L proceeded, by regular gradations, from in- 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 63 

duced trance to clairvoyance within a circle of mod- 
erate periphery, from the latfcer to clairvoyance as to 
events and objects at varying distances, and finally 
to the settled interiority of spontaneous extasis, dur- 
ing which she seemed wholly indrawn, cataleptic 
rigidity often supervening. 

Soon after the experiments were initiated, Miss 
L became so sensitive to the action of magnet- 
ism as to announce the presence of a large horseshoe 
magnet that had been placed in an adjoining room, 
twelve feet from the bed on which she was lying, 
declaring that she saw it through the wall, which 
was like a film between them, and indicating the 
exact point where it was placed. She was first tested 
within a moderate periphery, and was invariably 
correct in her answers ; then at considerable dis- 
tances; but, after the application of distant tests, 
exhibited symptoms of great exhaustion, complain- 
ing that she had been so far that it seemed as though 
she should never get back, and panting and sinking 
down with fatigue. 

Her clairvoyance at large distances was verified 
by every available test. It was resolved, as an experi- 
ment, to send her on a trip to the moon, of which 
she gave a whimsical description, styling its inhabi- 
tants the little folks, explaining how they lived, that 
their mouths were set vertically in their faces, and 
painting strange pictures of lunar crags and lakes. 
She only saw one animal, that resembled a pig ; and 
in one hut that she passed there was a baby in the 



64: NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

cradle, but it was dead. They did not call it dead, 
however, but asleep. 

On another occasion it was resolved to send her 
to Jupiter, but, after she had been in trance a few 
minutes, she showed symptoms of serious exhaus- 
tion, and it was deemed best to discontinue. In 
this trance she spoke of passing the land of the little 
folks, and of seeing them as she returned. 

And now was rapidly developed the phenome- 
non of spontaneous trance, during the paroxysms of 
which she talked of the denizens of the spirit-world 
as though she were already one of them. In one of 
these attacks she lay for nine hours, her limbs rigid. 
From this date, showing the mental aura engendered 
by the disorder, occurred some strange alterations 
in her habitual modes of speaking. She never, for 
instance, spoke of persons as dead, but as having 
left their shells and gone away. Tested as to the 
phenomenon of prevision, in one of these trances 
she would predict to the hour and minute w^hen the 
next would supervene, and her predictions were, 
without exception, verified. 

There were, it should be added, certain cerebral 
exponents accompanying these attacks. They were 
invariably heralded by a buzzing in the head, and fol- 
lowed by soreness at the base of the brain, indicating 
lesion of the medullary centres. They were accom- 
panied, also, by the phenomenon of cerebral lucidity, 
she describing her brain as lighted up, and herself 
as seeing with the top of her head. 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 65 

Case XVI.— The Eev. William Tennant, of 
New Jersey, subject from boyhood to nervous at- 
tacks, while conversing with his brother on the state 
of his sonl, suddenly fell down in a trance, in which 
he lay for three days, completely unconscious of what 
was passing around. He states that it was as if some 
invisible intelligence took him by the hand and 
wafted him along, until he came in sight of an ex- 
ceeding glory, in which swam angelic forms: He 
heard music that made all earthly music tame in 
comparison, but, when he wished to join the shining 
host, his angel cicerone gently detained him, and 
announced to him that he must return to earth. Full 
of sorrow, he was about remonstrating, when he 
suddenly found himself in bed in his own house, 
and saw his brother and the doctor standing near his 
bed in anxious consultation. His trance did not 
seem to him to last ten minutes. 

Case XYII. — A boy of ten years of age, the 
son of a washer-woman in New York City, highly 
intelligent, but subject to fits of absence, and to 
epileptic convulsions, was observed by a clergyman, 
who had taken an interest in him, to be in the habit 
of crossing and recrossing the street without any ap- 
parent reason, and to have a kind of terror of com- 
ing within the atmosphere of some persons, obvious- 
ly strangers to him, while taking no pains to avoid 
others. When the clergyman questioned him as to 
1 lis reason for avoiding one person rather than an- 
other, he invariably replied : " That man is bad ; I 



G6 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

can see evil spirits flocking about him and filling his 
mind with wicked thoughts." 

One night, two women, w r ell known for benevo- 
lence, were called to the death-bed of a consumptive 
woman — the boy's mother. In the room were the 
two Sisters of Mercy, the boy, now twelve years of 
age, and his two sisters. The woman was dying, 
but still had strength to beckon her son. The two 
whispered together for a minute, and the conversa- 
tion ended with the woman saying, " Is that all ? " 
When the fatal moment came, the boy fell down in 
a fit, and could not be startled out of his lethargy 
until all was over, w r hen he got up of his own accord, 
crying, "Mother is happy, and I am satisfied." 
Taking advantage of his momentary absence from 
the room, the ladies questioned his sisters as to the 
meaning of this strange pantomime. " Oh ! my 
brother sees spirits," answered one of them naively, 
"and mother called him to ask what some dark 
forms were that she saw around the bed. He said 
they were messengers sent to take her aw^ay. Then 
mother said, ' Is that all ? ' and died." 

Case XYIII. — Charles Matthews, comedian, sub- 
ject from boyhood to epileptic attacks. This case 
illustrates the action of nerve-aura at considerable 
distances. 

Soon after the demise of his first wife, while Mr. 
Matthews, then comparatively unknow T n, was playing 
in London, he was the subject of a singular vision. 
He had returned from the theatre one evening in a 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 67 

peculiarly restless mood. He went to bed, but was 
unable to sleep. Ideas and fancies crowded upon 
him ; lie turned and turned in bed, but slumber 
evaded him as it evades the insane in the stage of 
incubation. He would have rung for a light and 
have read for an hour or two — a habit of his before 
going to sleep, which he had that night neglected — 
but that it was late, and the house was already silent. 
In this state, therefore, he, lay for an hour or more, 
until a faint rustle, as of drapery, disturbed the cur- 
rent of his reverie, and, turning his head in the 
direction whence it came, there stood his wife in 
her habit as she lived. Smiling sweetly the while, 
the spectre bent to take his hand, when he started 
up in terror, and fell to the floor insensible. The 
fall wakened his landlord, and he was taken up in 
a fit, from which he did not recover for several days. 

Isolated, this commends itself to medical anal- 
ysis as a simple epileptic attack, with the usual pro- 
dromata of restlessness and abnormal nervous ex- 
citation. But what complicates it is that an actress, 
who afterward became his wife and wrote his biog- 
raphy, and who resided in an adjacent street, was at 
the same instant, as near as could be ascertained, the 
subject of the same vision, to be taken up in the 
same manner, insensible. The same unaccountable 
restlessness had precluded slumber, and culminated 
at the same moment in a vision of the late Mrs. 
Mathews, a sudden nervous shock, then insensibility. 

A strange case. But it seems evident that the 



68 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

origin of the fit was with Mr. Mathews, while that 
of his mistress was a reproduced attack, correspond- 
ing in every detail with its original. 

Case XIX. — Let me here, at the risk of egotism, 
detail briefly a series of psychological phenomena, 
pertaining principally to my own dream-life, and 
therefore susceptible of more minute analysis than 
those of a third person. I will premise that years 
of study and deprivation had preceded. 

In 1858, while a resident of New German town, 
New Jersey, I was acquainted with Mr. Lake, since 
a Lutheran clergyman, who lived at German Valley, 
a hamlet lying two leagues to the north. I had never 
been there. One afternoon, in August, Mr. Lake 
paid me a visit, and, after dining with me, returned 
home. That night I dreamed that, while sauntering 
along the road to German "V alley, I came suddenly, 
at a turn, upon a beautiful vista, that impressed 
itself on my memory, as dream-vistas often will. 
Of course, I thought no more of it, except as an 
addition to my stock of the beautiful ; and as Mr. 
Lake and I started for Hartwick Seminary, Otsego 
County, New York, a few days after, I never re- 
turned the visit. Two years later, while on a vaca- 
tion visit to New Germantown, business called me 
to German Yalley, and, at a turn of the road, I came 
full upon the vista of my dream. From that point on, 
I remembered every landmark, and threaded the way 
to the village as familiarly as though I had, at some 
date previous, been in the daily habit of doing so. 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 60 

In August, 1864, I find myself in New York — 
a stranger in a strange city. I had been in the city 
twice or thrice before, in transitu^ in my driftings 
to and fro, but was totally unacquainted with it ex- 
cept from geographical description, having to that 
date known more of the dim dream-cities of Ger- 
many — its antique university towns — than of the 
buzzing metropolis. I had been in New York some 
days, had exhausted the last dollar of my slender 
resources, and was in danger of starvation. One 
sultry evening I lounged up Broadway in the direc- 
tion of my little room in Bleecker Street, the rent 
of which had, fortunately, been paid in advance, 
having eaten nothing for forty-eight hours, but mut- 
tering scraps of rhyme as I went. I remember that 
sunset loiter as though it had been but yesterday. 
The first gnawings of hunger had worn off ; I was 
faint and flighty, but less uncomfortable than 1 had 
been twenty-four hours previous, in that settled ex- 
haustion had succeeded to the stage of acute craving. 
I knew the end was at hand, and had some dim in- 
tention of hastening it : consequently, destroyed 
every paper and letter in my possession that could 
possibly identify me. Having done so, I sat and 
wrote until long after midnight, toiling away at a 
ballad — " Broadway," I afterward entitled it — that 
had been running in my brain all the afternoon. 
On and on I wrote, until I nodded with weariness ; 
but I went to bed at last, and drifted to sleep, con- 
ning driblets of rhyme by the way, and keeping up 



70 NERYO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

a semi-delirious drone of verses until I finally lost 
consciousness. 

I had a single flash of dream — one only — then 
slept as one dead until noon the next day. 

In my dream I walk down Broadway, cross City 
Hall Square, and stop at a door with No. 19 over it 
in gilt numerals. I enter, thread dusty flights of 
stairs for four stories, and pause at last before a 
door labeled, " Editorial Rooms," in dingy gilt let- 
ters on a black ground. Pushing open the door, I 
find myself in the midst of a knot of gentlemen, pass 
through, and tap at the door of an interior room 
with the knob of my walking-stick. The door opens, 
and I am face to face with a tall and sad-faced gen- 
tleman, of quiet but kindly ways, who asks me to 
come in. After a conversation of possibly five min- 
utes, consumed in questions on his part and answers 
on mine, the sad-faced gentleman takes me to an 
adjoining room and introduces me to a corpulent, 
falcon-faced gentleman, whom he styles the city- 
editor, and who, in his turn, presents me to one of 
the knot in the outer room, with instructions to ex- 
plain my duties for the evening. This done, I thread 
my way down-stairs, and as I pass glance at the City- 
Hall clock. It is ten minutes past three. It has 
passed like a flash — the dream — and I am sound 
asleep again. 

Now, so curiously perverse is human nature that 
when I started down-town in the afternoon — it must 
have been two o'clock — it did not occur to me to 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 71 

follow out my dream. I lounged down Broadway 
listlessly, and, with mind curiously at rest, crossed 
City-Hall Square instinctively, passed the Hall of 
Records, and did not even recall the dream until I 
was at the door of No. 19 — when came recognition. 
I entered, went up-stairs, recognizing even the dusty 
banisters, and at the remembered landing stopped 
in front of the door labeled " Editorial Rooms." It 
was the same. I pushed it open and entered, find- 
ing myself in the midst of a group of gentlemen, 
every one of whom — from rubicund-visaged Dunn 
to sad-fated Watson — I had met the night before in 
dream-life. Crossing the room, I tapped at the in- 
ner door — one of three — with the top of my walk- 
ing-stick. The door opened, and there stood the 
sad-faced man — the late Isaac C. Pray. I was then 
presented to the falcon-faced city-editor — Mr. John 
Armstrong. There was no more vagueness about 
the recognition of either than there would have been 
had either been my own brother, instead of the per- 
fect stranger he actually was. I was then presented 
to the subordinate — Mr. J. Edmund Burke. It is a 
curious fact that I was not at all impressed with 
these coincidences, but accepted them rather as mat- 
ters of course than as events partaking of the phe- 
nomenal ; and as I emerged from the building, with 
instructions to report at Union Square at seven 
o'clock, I did not glance at the dial with any in- 
tention of verifying my dream to the last circum- 
stance, but merely to ascertain how long I had to 



72 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

rest — for I was weary beyond words — before report- 
ing for further orders. Nevertheless^ it was exactly 
ten minutes past three. 

I will adduce only one more case of this type, 
and one of no great importance in one aspect, but 
of peculiar significance in another. In October, 
1872, 1 was one of the editors of the Home Journal. 
One night, in a flash of dream, the senior editor, 
Mr. George Perry, called me to his desk for consul- 
tation upon a trifling question. As I dreamed it, 
it was a quarter-past two by the clock just over my 
left shoulder, as I stood talking with him. The 
next day, at the hour and minute, that consultation 
occurred, and verified the dream to the minutest de- 
tail. "Wholly without premeditation — for the dream 
had not even occurred to me from the hour I sat down 
at my desk, between ten and eleven in the morning, 
until it was abruptly recalled by the remark of Mr. 
Perry, " Fairfield, I'd like to talk with you a min- 
ute " — the exact words with which, as I had dreamed 
it, the conversation was commenced. 

Certain peculiarities distinguishing them from 
ordinary dreaming have always accompanied these 
flashes of consciousness. 1. They are invariably in- 
stantaneous, preceded by nothing, followed by noth- 
ing — sudden islands of dream in a sea of sleep ! — 
and consist, however complex in details, of one swift 
impression. 2. Apart from myself, I see myself do- 
ing this or that as a kind of double, whereas, in or- 
dinary dreaming, there is no double consciousness. 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 73 

To be more explicit, in ordinary dreaming I am con- 
scious of myself as taking part in this or tliat trans- 
action, as pursued by ghouls, or taking a walk down 
Broadway and meeting an Egyptian pyramid at a 
particular corner ; while in these rarer phenomena 
I, as a spectator, see myself doing a given act, con- 
scious that the doer is a kind of double of mine — 
conscious of identity also, but still not identical. 

In the spring of 1867, after many days of suffer- 
ing with neuralgia in the right temple, I managed 
to get detailed from the home-staff for a few weeks, 
and was sent on a correspondent's commission to 
Connecticut, which practically enabled me to lounge 
a few days at the homestead in Stafford. I had left 
in occupancy of my rooms in town a young man in 
whom I took a friend's and a student's interest — an 
example of morbid psychological anatomy, and the 
victim of attacks of suicidal impulse. I was at 
home. At a quarter before seven, by the clock in 
the old east room, as I was pacing to and fro, I was 
smitten with a sudden spasm of numbness, lasting 
possibly a second, and succeeded by a rapid flash of 
vision. I saw the young man with a vial of dark 
liquid in his hand, in the act of putting it to his 
mouth. I saw the room, as if a lightning-flash had 
suddenly lit it up for an instant, and noticed that 
the sofa had been moved from one corner to another 
— which was the fact. So possessing was the vision, 
that I cried, " Stop ! " before the absurdity of doing 
so at that distance occurred to me. Mere fancy, 
4 



74 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

some will say, conjured by worry ; but, as exactly 
as can be ascertained, the young man was, at the in- 
stant specified, in the act of putting a vial of lauda- 
num to his lips ; and he stated to me afterward that 
he was deterred from drinking the whole ounce by 
an uncontrollable force. " It was," said he, " as if 
some invisible person had taken hold of my hand, 
and forcibly prevented me from drinking ; and, 
somehow, I didn't dare to try it again after that.'' 
Now, curiously enough, my premonition that the 
young man would kill himself before I got back, 
which had haunted me during the whole journey 
thus far, passed away with the shock, the vision, 
and the consequent shout ; and though I was absent 
from town nearly three weeks longer, and did not 
once hear from him, I was not in the least worried. 
I seemed to know, as if by instinct, that the danger 
was past, and would not again recur ; whereas, until 
then, I had been oppressed as with a spectre. 

In June, 1868, having rooms at a Broadway ho- 
tel, I was, after some weeks of over-work, prostrated 
with a kind of nervous fever, and lay for some days 
in a state bordering upon delirium. My rooms were 
so distant from the street that, under ordinary cir- 
cumstances, its scurry was subdued to a continuous 
roar. As I came to myself I was conscious of hear- 
ing with analytic distinctness the feet of persons on 
the walk, and of an interwoven and inextricable 
tangle of separate noises caused by stages and car- 
riages. They were not louder than usual, only more 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 75 

distinct. I could tell when a stage stopped and a 
passenger alighted or got in, and lay and counted by 
the hour the footsteps of pedestrians, often follow- 
ing one person among the mass for squares, until 
he turned into a by-street, or faded into distance. 
Properly speaking, this phenomenon was not due to 
the excitation of the auditory nerves, though there 
was unusual acuteness in that direction, but to dis- 
tinct impulses transmitted by way of the walls of 
the building. In a word, vibrations of material 
media, so minute as under ordinary circumstances 
to be imponderable, w T ere appreciated by the ner- 
vous system, and entered into the impressions of 
consciousness. In addition to this, within a circle of 
moderate periphery, say twenty feet in diameter, I 
saw with superhuman distinctness. For example, 
I saw and knew persons passing in the hall, possibly 
ten feet from the bed, with the wall between, but 
could not distinguish them, except as they flitted 
across the disk of a circle to which my vision was 
limited. I say saw, when I should say that I knew 
in a manner that was at once vision and audition ; 
yet I did not once pass into the trance-state, though 
lying for four days just on its border. I may say, 
therefore, that I personally know that clairvoyance 
is in the nature of a peripheral nerve-aura of greater 
or less diameter, this aura entering into intimate 
molecular relation and contact with surrounding ob- 
jects ; and I am justified, I think, in regarding the 
nervous phenomena of this attack as entitled to 



76 NERYO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

the consideration of facts experimentally demon- 
strated. 

Once more : and tlie phenomena in this instance 
may throw some light on the genesis of spirit-poems, 
like those of MissDoten and mediums of that class. 

In the summer of 1862, having occasion for the 
services of a dentist, I was subjected to anaesthesia, 
the agent being sulphuric ether. I recall, as though 
it had been but yesterday,, the strange operation of 
the drug, and the gradual dying, nerve by nerve, until 
waves of unconsciousness enveloped the sensory 
centres, and my eyes were like stones in my head. 
But an island of consciousness — an irregular tract, of 
the limits of which I was aware — persisted in the 
very top of the head, or in the gray cerebral enve- 
lope (cortex of the brain). This was accompanied by 
sensory impressions of a peculiar type. I saw Dr. 
Clark drop the napkin ; I saw him hurriedly going 
through with the operation. I saw him lay down 
the forceps when he had completed it ; and was con- 
scious through it all that the cortex of the brain 
was uniquely responsible for these sensory impres- 
sions — in a word, that I saw with the top of my 
head, and through the medium of an external sen- 
sory atmosphere. 

A strange mental aura, accompanied with ner- 
vous perturbation, succeeded, and lasted for some 
days, during which I was as one in a dream. Its 
leading exponent consisted in the production of 
strange and unreal poems, one of which I shall 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 77 

quote, asking the reader to compare it with Poe's 
ballad of " Ulalume," and to bear in mind that at 
that time I had never read Poe's ballad : 

"The night it was misty and phantasmagoria!, 
For the sun had set ashen as lead — 
Of his beams shorn, and ashen as lead ; 
And many a shadow of ancient memorial 
Came up from the tombs of the dead — 
Came up on its mission phantasmagorial, 
From the tombs of the legended dead. 

" The stars they were shut from my revel — 
From the sight of my wassail and revel, 
In the palace of princes entombed ; 
For the omens they boded were evil — 
Were omens as men said of evil, 
And of hearts unto ghastliness doomed : 
Wherefore, they were shut from my revel, 
In the palace of princes entombed. 

" By the light of a triple- winged triad, 
I quaffed from a goblet of gold, 
That was wrought ere the birth of a dryad, 
In the years immemorially old — 
That was wrought of red ruby and gold, 
Ere the birth of a sylph or a dryad, 
In the years immemorially old — 
In the days of the ghouls immemorially old. 

" And I drank of the wine called the living, 
Of the wine that is life to men's souls ; 
Of the amethyst extract of souls 
I quaffed with no word of misgiving — 
With no tremor or word of misgiving — 
And I said that as long as earth rolls 



78 NERYO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

I will drink of this liquid of souls ; 
I was mad with the wine called the living, 
And I sang to the princess of ghouls — 
To Lilitha, Princess of Ghouls. 

" They call the princess of the land of never, 
Where worms on beauty dine, 
But be thou princess of what land soever, 
Come quaff the living wine, 
And to thy damned ghastliness forever, 
Take this mad heart of mine. 

"Men say thou dwellest in palaces of shadow, 
"With hearts ghastlily doomed, 
Never to see the asphodel meadow 
Of heroes entombed — 

That where never a morrow breaks over their sorrow 
Thy haunted hearts are entombed. 

" But blood-red banners spread their pinions 

Over a fabric where shadows dwell, 

Drifting, drifting, drifting drearily through pulseless do- 
minions, 

To the music of Azrael — 

Drifting, drifting, drifting drearily through haunted do- 
minions, 

Whose king is Azrael. 

" And though at thy grim name the Arab winces, 
And his swart lips grow white, 
Come quaff the wine of life with me, my princess, 
In wild delight, 

And it shall thrill thy limbs with life, my princess, 
And mad delight. 

" Ah, many have fallen unshriven 
In the amethyst glory of wine, 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 79 

And a few stars have wasted from heaven, 

Since that ghoul-haunted revel of mine ; 

But neither unshriven nor shriven 

Shall slumber these pulses of mine, 

Since by night with the princess of ghouls 

I have quaffed of the ghoul-haunted wine — 

Ah ! neither unshriven nor shriven, 

And neither in bell nor in heaven, 

Shall they rest from the ghoul- haunted wine.'' 

This is one of several products of the mental 
aura induced by a single experiment in anaesthesia ; 
and, like the rest, it was written at a sitting, the re- 
sult of an overbearing impulse, under which I was a 
mere automaton — rapidly, and in a handwriting so 
transformed that I doubt whether my most intimate 
correspondent would have identified it as mine. 
One fact, however, that disbars the spiritualist inter- 
pretation of the phenomenon, is that the handwrit- 
ing resembled Poe's as little as it did mine. Indeed, 
although, in my ordinary moods, my hand is very 
similar to Poe's, that of this manuscript, and of 
others produced during that period, departs vastly 
in style from the analytic, continuous, and well-or- 
dered regularity in the formation and grouping of 
letters common to Poe's manuscript and to my own. 

The conclusion, therefore, notwithstanding its re- 
semblance to the ballad of " Ulalume," which I had 
never read, is that these verses represent simply a 
transformed nervous impulse, directly and uniquely 
connected with the morbid intellectual aura engen- 
dered by ansesthesia ; and in support of this hy- 



80 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

pothesis I will add that my subsequent experiments 
with, anaesthetics have invariably resulted in similar 
phenomena. 

"Without venturing upon disquisition at this junc- 
ture, I will merely say in concluding this case that 
I am of cephalic temperament, and inherit a neu- 
rotic tendency from my father ; also, that the phe- 
nomena have occurred only at periods of exceeding 
nervous disturbance and of reduced physical condi- 
tion, and have been invariably accompanied by mor- 
bid impulses of more or less intensity : that, in a 
word, they are purely nervous phenomena. 

Case XX. — This case illustrates one aspect of 
the phenomenon of clairvoyance — that known to 
exponents of mesmerism as transfer of state, and 
consisting of the cognition of acts and events pres- 
ent in the memory of a second person. It is, so far 
as my observations have extended, invariably associ- 
ated with epileptic neurosis, and occurs spontane- 
ously during the often merely half absence of the 
larvated fit. Heinrich Zschokke, the Swiss poet and 
statesman, remarks, in his autobiography, that it has 
frequently been given to him, on his first interview 
with a stranger, to see the man's life passing before 
him like a dream. At first he laid no stress upon 
these impressions, and regarded them as imaginary 
and unreal ; but subsequent test convinced him of 
their accuracy as to fact, and he soon learned to rely 
on them implicitly. He relates, in confirmation of 
the unerring sagacity of these impressions, that one 



NERYO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 81 

day at Waldshut, as he was dining with a friend 
at the hotel, the conversation was turned by a stran- 
ger, who sat facing him at the table, upon the pecu- 
liarities of the Swiss. The stranger railed at Mes- 
mer and Lavater, until his friend begged him to 
make some reply, and vindicate the fame of his 
countrymen. 

Zschokke then turned to the stranger. " At 
that moment," says he, " the man's life passed be- 
fore me, and I offered to tell him the various events 
of his past, if he would but confess frankly whether 
I was correct.' 5 

He assented, and Zschokke proceeded with his 
narrative, event by event, from the student-life of 
his vis-a-vis to his latter career, including, among 
other details, a liberty he had once taken with the 
strong box of his principal, and describing the room 
and the black box on the table, the robbery and the 
manner of its perpetration. The stranger was as- 
tounded, but frankly confessed the exactness and 
accuracy of the story, cordially shook hands with his 
tormentor, and departed amid bursts of laughter. 

The rationale of phenomena of this class will be 
better comprehended when (if ever) the laws of 
memory as a nervo-psychic register shall have been 
more thoroughly elucidated. That the nervous or- 
ganism registers its succession of states organically 
cannot be disputed in view of observed facts ; but 
in what manner these nervous states are translated 
or correlated as states of consciousness, is a problem 



82 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

that is unsolved. The fact that there is an actual 
correlation accounts, however, for the phenomenon 
illustrated in this remarkable instance, and removes 
it from the circle of spiritualist speculation to that 
of scientific psychology. 

Case XXI. — In 1839 Prof. Agassiz submitted 
himself to a series of experiments conducted by the 
Rev. C. Hare Townshend, the friend of Dickens, 
and an acute lecturer on the subject of mesmerism. 
His description of the first experiment is pecul- 
iarly valuable in two respects : 1. As demonstrating 
that mesmeric slumber resembles the larvated or 
cerebral fit, in that it is preceded by a nervous 
shock; 2. As a minute analysis, at the hands of 
a scientific observer of undoubted veracity, of the 
psychical phenomena that follow. Agassiz's paper, 
written the morning after the experiment (February 
22, 1839), is entitled " Notes Eelatifs au Magnetisme 
Animal," and has, so far as I am aware, never been 
published in America. 

" "Wishing," says the professor, " to form some 
opinion of mesmerism, I sought an opportunity to 
experiment upon myself in regard to its phenomena, 
so as to avoid all doubt as to the actual nature of 
the sensations. Accordingly, at the instance of M. 
Desor, I was introduced to Mr. Townshend. 

" It was ten o'clock in the evening when, seated 
facing each other, Mr. Townshend took hold of my 
hand and began to look at me fixedly. The moment 
I saw him trying to exert an action on me, I silently 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 83 

addressed the Author of all things, imploring hirn to 
enable me to resist and to be conscientious as to the 
facts. I then fixed my eyes upon the operator. I 
was in test condition for the experiment, for the 
hour was one I was in the habit of devoting to 
study, and I had no disposition to sleep. I was 
master of myself, able to subdue all emotion and 
repress all tendency to flightiness of imagination. 

" However, at the expiration of at least a quarter 
of an hour, I felt the sensation of a current through 
all my limbs, and from that moment my eyes grew 
heavy. I then saw Mr. Townshend extend his 
hands before my eyes ; the,ri make different circular 
movements around them, causing them to become 
still heavier. Then an irresistible heaviness of the 
lids compelled me to shut them, and gradually I 
ceased to have the power to keep them open, though 
I did not the less retain the consciousness of what 
was going on around me. I heard M. Desor speak 
and Mr. Townshend answer, and knew what they 
said. I also heard the questions they asked me, but 
was incapable of answering, though I tried to speak. 
When, at last, I succeeded in framing an articula- 
tion, I perceived that I was passing out of the state 
of torpor, which had been rather agreeable than the 
contrary. 

" In this state I heard the cry of ten o'clock ; 
then I heard the clock strike the quarter past. 
After that I fell into a deeper sleep, although I did 
not completely lose consciousness. It appeared to 



84 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

me that Mr. Townshend was exerting himself to 
render me unconscious, and my movements seemed 
to be under his control, for I wished repeatedly to 
alter the position of my arms, but could not, nor had 
the power to will it, although I felt my head carried 
to the right or left shoulder, and backward and for- 
ward, without wishing it, and even in opposition to 
my wishes. I experienced also a pleasant sensation 
in giving way to the attraction ; then a kind of won- 
der, when my head fell into Mr. Townshend's hand, 
which appeared to be the cause of that attraction. 

" To his inquiry whether I was well, and how 
I felt, I was unable to reply, but I smiled — that is, 
felt my features expand into a sinile that I was 
unable to resist. From that moment I wanted to 
wake up and was a little restive ; yet, when Mr. 
Townshend asked me if I wished to be awakened, 
I made a hesitating movement with my shoulders. 
He then repeated his passes, and I fell into a deep- 
er sleep, though I was still conscious of what was 
passing around me. 

" He then asked me if I would like to become 
lucid, meanwhile continuing the passes from the face 
to the arms; and I suddenly experienced an inde- 
scribable sensation of delight, rays of dazzling light 
dancing before my eyes for an instant, then disap- 
pearing. I was now inwardly sorry at this state 
being prolonged, and wanted to wake up, but could 
not. Still, when Mr. Townshend and M. Desor 
spoke, I heard them. I also heard the clock strike, 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 85 

and tlie hour-cry in the street, but did not know what 
hour was cried. Mr. Townshend then tested me 
with the usual experiments to ascertain whether I 
was clairvoyant, but I was unable to distinguish 
any thing. The clock struck the quarter, and I 
heard it. 

"Mr. Townshend then made some quick trans- 
verse movements from the face laterally, which in- 
stantly opened my eyes. I got up and said, ' I thank 
you. 5 It was a quarter-past eleven o'clock. The 
operator then told me, and M. Desor repeated it, 
that the only fact that had satisfied them that I was 
in mesmeric sleep was the facility with which my 
head followed the movements of Mr. Townshend' s 
hand, although there was no contact." 

Case XXII. — Florence Cook, of cephalic-vital 
temperament, lies entranced in an adjoining room, 
while the phantom form of a lady in luminous robes 
suddenly appears in the parlor, the phantom bearing 
a vague resemblance to the medium. Scientific tests 
have been tried by Mr. Yarley, the eminent electri- 
cian, and by Prof. Crookes, with the result of 
demonstrating the non-identity of the medium and 
the phantom, the latter having had an opportunity 
of observing Miss Cook lying in trance, while the 
apparition in white robes was standing by her. 
During these seances Miss Cook lies in deep trance, 
bordering on catalepsy. 

Case XXIII. — Dr. Henry Sylvester Cornwell, of 
New London, Conn., of cerebro-vital temperament 



86 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

and inherited consumptive tendency, feels at inter- 
vals the contact of spirit-hands ; and, united to singu- 
lar fecundity and strangeness of imagination, an- 
alogous to that of Poe, and participating in the 
same series of morbid sensorial impressions, exhibits 
an intellectual aura resembling that of the late John 
"Worth Edmonds, but has no sensory cognition of 
environing intelligences. 

I have instanced this case in the nervo-psychic 
series of phenomena, associated with spiritualism, 
rather as prefacing the remark that the sensation de- 
scribed by Dr. Cornwell is incident to a state of the 
nervous system, than as important in itself : a symp- 
tom, and a very frequent symptom, in nervous dis- 
orders, not a spiritual phenomenon ; and a symptom 
never dissociated, so far as I have observed, from 
reflex excitability, and always significant of actual 
nervous disturbances. Inheriting a neurotic ten- 
dency, I have personally experienced this sensation 
at different periods of my life, and have learned to 
regard it as the invariable precursor of pronounced 
morbid phenomena — as calling for tonics, not for 
table-tipping. 

Of the thirty-nine cases of inherited neurosis in 
which I have made particular inquiry as to this 
symptom, it has been distinctly present in twenty- 
seven, as one of the prodromata of impending dis- 
turbance of a more serious nature. In the instance 
of Judge Edmonds, for example, this symptom pre- 
ceded the more exaggerated symptom of spirit-see- 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 87 

ing. Not in the nature of an hallucination, because 
a real sensation resulting from morbid excitability 
of the peripheral nerves, the phenomenon is like 
sudden contact, sometimes very soft, sometimes very 
pronounced, with invisible hands ; so like it, indeed, 
that, wakened out of a reverie by the sensation of a 
hand on my shoulder, I have often turned instinc- 
tively, expecting to find some person standing be- 
hind me. In my own case this symptom has gener- 
ally coexisted with another that I can only describe 
as the hearing of inner voices. 

Case XXIV.— Dr. C. S. Sprague, of Stafford, 
Connecticut, whose father was a practising physician 
for many years previous to his death, relates that 
his first case in . the town where he now practises, 
was a case of typhoid fever. His father, it should 
be premised, died when he was a mere lad. He was 
exceedingly anxious concerning the case, as his suc- 
cess in his profession was somewhat dependent on it, 
and returned from his visit in a state of worry and 
nervousness that no distraction of attention served 
to dissipate. He fell asleep that night, cogitating 
on the indicia of the case, and the best method of 
correcting them, and passed, with scarcely a break 
in consciousness, from cogitation and worry to a 
dream, in which his father appeared standing by the 
bed, and distinctly explained to him that the symp- 
toms indicated certain remedies. The doctor adopted 
the suggestions of the spirit, and the patient recovered. 
Dr. Sprague deposes that he had never had any con- 



88 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

versation with his father, an homoeopathic physician, 
concerning the indicia of typhoid fever, and that his 
dream conld not have sprang from any unconscious 
reminiscence of his father's practice. In explana- 
tion of this phenomenon, as in the similar case quoted 
by Mr. Macnish, the physiologist is irresistibly im- 
pelled to adopt the hypothesis of the heredity of 
special nervous impressions, or, in better terms, to 
extend the process of hereditary transmission so as 
to cover, not only the general habits and nervous 
idiosyncrasies of an ancestor, but the particular im- 
pressions recorded in his nervous organism as sub- 
jects of conscious recollection ; -so that, under cir- 
cumstances of unusual nervous perturbation, one 
may recollect, if the word may be permitted, ideas 
and events originally impressed upon the recollec- 
tion of his father or grandfather, but with which he 
is totally unacquainted by verbal or written record ; 
and thus, to put the ascertained facts in the form 
of a proposition, any impression recorded in the 
nervous organization of an ancestor is potential in 
the nervous organization of his descendants. I have 
been able to investigate thoroughly, from this aspect 
of the subject, but very few cases of monomania, 
and shall prosecute the examination at further length 
hereafter; but the few I have been able to bring 
under the microscope (if that metaphor be permis- 
sible) have served to convince me that medical men 
must, in some cases at least, seek for the etiology 
of the special forms that monomania takes, in the 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 89 

heredity of special nervous impressions, which, in 
the ancestor, may not have risen to the intensity of 
mania. If, again, as must be presumed in this in- 
stance, the vision incident to the actualization of the 
impression, present to the conscious recollection of 
the father, but potential only in the organism of the 
son, was the sequel of its heredity, a new and singu- 
lar aspect of the law of association, as it pertains to 
psychological phenomena, presents itself to the view 
of the psychologist. The case adduced by Mr. Mac- 
nish and that of Dr. Sprague are coincident in re- 
spect to the vision ; and, with other cases, which 
Dr. Gieser, a plodding German, has collected and 
verified, but from which he has neglected — being an 
exponent of the theories of animal magnetism — to 
draw any valuable conclusions, seem to me to in- 
dicate that the law of association is more deeply 
grounded in nervous organization, and constitutes 
a more important element in our psychical experi- 
ences than has been generally supposed, even by the 
most devout disciples of Mr. James Mill. It may, 
from this aspect, be held responsible for one class 
of the visions occurring in trance and clairvoyance ; 
while, considered as a source of the strange intelli- 
gence associated with these nervous states, it is cer- 
tainly of great importance. Dr. Sprague is of pro- 
nounced nervous temperament. 

Case XXV. — J. R. Brown, of Iowa, twenty- 
one years of age, and of cerebro-vital temperament. 
His clairvoyance resembles that of Miss L in its 



90 NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

initial stages. Finds and describes articles by tlie 
process generally turned thought-reading. His trances 
are preceded by slight nervous shocks, and he ex- 
hibits symptoms of exceeding physical exhaustion 
when his seances have been at all prolonged, or have 
called for more than ordinary feats. 

Case XXVI. — A well-known lawyer, of large 
practice in the State of Connecticut, gives several 
instances in which he has been impressed of coming 
events in dreams. On one occasion he dreamed that 
his nephew, a little boy of four years old, had fallen 
into a well and been drowned. A few days later he 
was called to attend the funeral of that nephew, 
whose death had taken place in the exact manner 
foreshadowed. On another occasion, he dreamed 
that his brother, then living in New Jersey, and in 
good health for aught he knew to the contrary, came 
in at the east door of the old house where his boy- 
hood was passed, haggard and wan with illness, and 
that he looked up at the clock as his brother entered, 
and noticed that it was just four in the afternoon. 
The dream worried him a little the next morning, 
but he had quite forgotten it, and was sitting in the 
east room of the old house, poring over a legal trea- 
tise, when a feeble step was heard in the space that 
led from the open wood-house to the east door ; then 
the door opened, and his brother walked wearily in. 
It was exactly four o'clock ; and the strangest part 
of it all was, that this brother, who had been absent 
for some months, was dressed exactly as he had 



NERVO-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 91 

seemed to be in the dream of the previous night, and 
in a suit he had procured after leaving home. 

I conclude this series, which might be extended 
into a volume, with this case ; merely observing that 
the theory of accidental coincidences, so often called 
in by scientific men for their explanation, breaks 
down under practical tests, and that the brain-wave 
hypothesis, although undoubtedly competent to the 
explanation of the more ordinary phenomena here 
instanced, has, in addition to the fact that it is un- 
verifiable — an invented hypothesis, not one flowing 
directly from the nature of the facts to be elucidat- 
ed, but a mere extension of the wave-theory of light 
— no application to the presentiment and prevision 
that so frequently occur in these nervous states, and 
must therefore be dismissed to the limbo of clever 
but inadequate attempts to give coherence and uni- 
formity to a troublesome series of facts, without 
being at the pains to investigate them thoroughly. 
They are facts that call for careful analysis of all the 
conditions under which they occur, not for hasty 
generalization. 



IV. 

PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 

I hate purposely permitted the preceding memo- 
randa of cases to take a large range, and to exceed 
the limits apparently prescribed by the subject, by 
way of illustrating the psychic phenomena associated 
with spiritualism in all the protean aspects in which 
they are or may be exhibited. 

In the majority of these instances I have been 
able to verify the existence of an hereditary predis- 
position. So, also, in many cases the psychic phe- 
nomena of which are not so pronounced as to be 
worthy of particular description. Mrs. Isabella B. 
Hooker, of Hartford, Connecticut, for example, in. 
herits nervous malady from her father. So with the 
daughter of the late Judge Edmonds — a medium of 
considerable repute, whose habit of trance-speaking, 
in languages unknown to her through the ordinary 
process of study, has been examined en passant, and 
who presents, physically, one of the most pronounced 
examples I have ever glanced at, of the congeries of 
symptoms associated with active neurosis of this 



PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 93 

type. Again, in the case of Robert Dale Owen — 
by far thfe most intellectual literary exponent of 
spiritualism in America — hereditary predisposition 
plays an important part, as is evident from keen 
scrutiny of the career and personal history of the 
elder Owen. 

It frequently happens that an inherited neurotic 
tendency exhibits itself in a very different form in 
different members of the same family. In the in- 
stance of Mrs. Hooker, for example, occur the or- 
dinary physical exponents of inherited nervous dis- 
order, conjoined to a tendency to vagary and eccen- 
tricity, that borders upon aberration of mind ; while 
in her sister, Mrs. Stowe, and in other members of 
the family, so far as I am able to ascertain, the pre- 
disposition expends itself in a well-marked and pe- 
culiar mental aura, with psychical and emotional 
traits sui generis. In like manner, in Miss Lamb, 
the sister of the humorist, the hereditary predispo- 
sition manifested itself in periodical attacks of an 
epileptic nature, while in her gifted brother (Charles 
Lamb) it was mainly present as an intellectual bias, 
and contributed its rarest gems to the literature of 
humor. Indeed, as those eminent alienists, Morel, 
Moreau de Tours, Dr. Maudsley, and Dr. Anstie, 
have long since demonstrated, not only are the va- 
rious neuroses constantly convertible, but hereditary 
neurosis frequently exhibits itself as an intellectual 
aura, without pronounced nervous disturbance, though 
generally coexistent with a moodiness having more 



94 PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERYO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 

or less tendency to periodicity. 1 This observation 
lias been verified so often that it is unnecessary to 
adduce instances. 

In this aspect of the subject, hereditary neurosis 
of the dormant variety must be regarded as the 
cause of many of the most wonderful creations in 
literature and art. 

Minute analysis of the biography of Poe dis- 
closes the fact that his most remarkable tales and 
poems exhibit a periodicity of imaginative produc- 
tion : he himself says that poetry with him was a 
passion, not a profession. So it was with Coleridge, 
and so it was with that wonderful boy whose literary 
forgeries so long baffled criticism, and who called 
his cantos fit the first, fit the second, and so on — all 

1 The three sisters of Gilbert Stuart, the celebrated portrait- 
painter, whose fitful moroseness was the puzzle of his friends, were 
all early subject to epileptic paroxysms. One of them, an artist her- 
self of singular felicity in portraits, died a raving maniac at Butler 
Hospital. Another was for years a confirmed maniac ; the third 
had quiet intervals. A singular fatality, as the records of Butler 
Hospital intimate, followed the Allston family, of whom the famous 
Washington Allston is the most generally remembered. The father 
of Raphael d'Urbino was, it is estimated by Passavant, subject to 
paroxysms of clairvoyance and presentiment ; and if, in general, the 
ancestors of men and women of strange powers of imagination were 
to be subject to vigilant investigation, it would, no doubt, clearly ap- 
pear that the etiology of certain singular aspects of this faculty, as 
illustrated in the biography of those who have startled the world by 
strange creations in poetry and the kindred arts, is to be sought in a 
kind of larvated type of hereditary neurosis. Dr. Maudsley, in the 
position he assumes on this question, is supported by the closest 
scrutiny of the facts. 



PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 95 

fits — finally a suicidal fit that ended him. Dr. John- 
son was the son of an epileptic. Turner's sunsets, 
with their sun-shot purples and semi-glooms, are 
the products of a strange man ; and William Blake, 
the strangest of English painters, painted like a man 
in trance. "Wellington's epilepsy disappeared on the 
field, his accumulated nervous force finding a con- 
ductor active enough to dissipate it as fast as it was 
generated. 

The career of Robespierre, with his sunken tem- 
ples, and face eternally jerking, is to be regarded, 
from the scientific stand-point, as the exponent of 
hereditary nervous disorder, intensified by depriva- 
tion at first, and afterward by the circumstances of 
the Revolution in France. Mohammed's revela- 
tions represent a series of epileptic trances ; Swe- 
denborg's confess the same etiology ; and, generally 
speaking, as Dr. Maudsley acutely observes, there is 
no doubt that mankind is indebted for not a little 
of its originality, and for certain special forms of 
intellectual activity, to individuals who have sprung 
from families in which the neurotic tendency is 
hereditary. The wonderful mastery of morbid 
psychology exhibited by writers like Scott, Dickens, 
Poe, Hawthorne, Heyne and Freytag, Baudelaire 
and Victor Hugo — and of morbid impulse in its va- 
rious aspects — thus presents itself as a kind of lar- 
vated form of nervous perversion, liable always to 
transformation into the acute, and often coexisting 
with it. 



96 PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 

In America — at least in tlie New England States 
and in New York, to which, rny observations have 
been principally limited — I have no hesitation in say- 
ing that alcohol has played a prominent part in the 
production of nervous degeneracy; and, with Dr. 
Anstie, I am inclined to think that of all depressing 
agencies it has the most decided tendency to impress 
the nervous centres of a progenitor with a neurotic 
type that will necessarily be transmitted to his de- 
scendants. That it often produces epilepsy within 
a single generation, is a demonstrable fact, though 
alcoholic epilepsy is not yet known to the medical 
text-books. Unscientific preparation and insuffi- 
ciency of food, conjoined to hard work on the part 
of the women, and harder work on the part of the 
men, have also been exceedingly active causes, par- 
ticularly in the New England States, in perverting 
the nervous organization ; and though Niemeyer's 
estimate, applicable to Germany, that the ratio of 
epileptics to general population is one to one hun- 
dred, is probably in excess of the facts in this coun- 
try, it is nevertheless true that obscure epilepsy is 
alarmingly common. 

Omitting grand mal, or falling-sickness, from 
the discussion, I shall limit myself to the three types 
of petit, mal — fits of absence or of intellectual 
eclipse, lasting generally but a few seconds, with 
pallor and stupefaction as its symptoms ; vertiginous 
epilepsy, with its more or less prolonged suspension 
and its partial convulsions of the face ; cerebral or 



PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERYO-PSYCH1C SERIES. 97 

larvated epilepsy, with its absence of contempora- 
neous convulsions — and to that important variety 
known as the nocturnal paroxysm. 

Calmeil, who was the first to demonstrate the 
epileptic nature of the fit of absence, regards it as 
an averted attack of vertigo ; while Herpin observes 
that it is always possible to detect some slight partial 
shock in every case of absence, and some slight 
partial convulsions. These attacks, says Herpin, are 
never ushered in by complete unconsciousness, nor 
by the wild initial cry ; and though the never of 
that eminent authority states the case too forcibly, 
it is nevertheless true that the nervous shock is not 
always accompanied by loss of consciousness. The 
nocturnal paroxysm often occurs unsuspected even 
by the victim, or is registered simply as nightmare, 
and frequently eludes the observation of vigilant 
physicians. 

How difficult it is to detect epilepsy in these ob- 
scure forms, and to what extent it contributes in de- 
termining the direction of the intellectual activity, 
are illustrated daily in medical psychology. I was 
on somewhat intimate terms with Mansfield Tracy 
Walworth for several years previous to his death, 
and meanwhile engaged in investigating, from life, 
morbid psychology in its various forms ; but it was 
not until I had known him two years that I began 
to suspect that the somewhat singular traits, psychi- 
cal and intellectual, illustrated in his novels, had 
their origin in the epileptic malady ; although the 
5 



98 PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIO SERIES. 

existences of peculiar nervous impulses — one of 
them his habit of carrying his hand to his breast im- 
pulsively in moments of animation — had not escaped 
me. One day, within a few months of his tragic 
death, Mr. Walworth and myself were standing on 
the corner at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, engaged in 
conversation, when I observed for the moment a pe- 
culiar propensity to repeat my remarks before reply- 
ing, and also to repeat his own final phrases. His 
eyes were faded, he was pale, and talked like a man 
in a dream ; but recovered suddenly, and was him- 
self again. Indeed, but for the phenomenon of 
repetition, which is pretty constant in that class of 
cases, I should not have suspected that the brief fit 
of absent-mindedness I had just observed was of 
epileptic nature. Subsequent observation confirmed 
the impression, however, and furnished the clew to 
the peculiar psychical and imaginative traits exem- 
plified in his life and literature. 

Still more likely to escape the attention even of 
the average medical observer is the obscure type 
known as nocturnal epilepsy, and yet no type more 
rapidly degenerates the nerve-centres alike in struct- 
ure and function. The extent to which it prevails 
is indicated by the fact that it is seldom absent in 
cases of periodical aberration of mind. " I would 
take pains to affirm," says Dumesnil, " that there 
is now no patient at the institution under my direc- 
tion whose insanity is not associated with slight 
nocturnal attacks, which up to the present have es- 



PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 99 

caped our attention." Trousseau justly remarks 
that all nocturnal accidents should suggest epilepsy ; 
and my own observations have led me to the con- 
clusion that habitual attacks of nightmare and som- 
nambulism are generally exponents of epileptic neu- 
rosis, and are often subject to the periodicity associ- 
ated with the disorder. This was, no doubt, true in 
the instance of Mary Carrick ; and in another less 
dramatic instance that recently came under my no- 
tice, phenomena of the same specific type, though 
less pronounced in rappings and other dynamic 
manifestations, were, upon minute observation, de- 
monstrated to coexist with nocturnal fits, accompa- 
nied with stertorous breathing and scarcely percep- 
tible convulsions. In two other instances of settled 
somnambulism, careful observation has enabled me 
to detect the periodicity, and, what is more important, 
the precursory symptom of a slight nervous shock. 

I have dwelt thus minutely upon these points, 
by way of indicating two things : 1. That the popu- 
lar conception of epilepsy, based principally upon 
its convulsions, is a very unscientific one, and is 
incompatible with any just idea of the extent to 
which it is prevalent ; 2. That the whole series 
of morbid phenomena instanced as nervo-psychic 
naturally group themselves about the epileptic neu- 
rosis under its various transformations, and are al- 
ways preceded by nervous shocks of greater or less 
intensity. Also, by way of preface to the discussion 
of another and more relevant point. 



100 PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 

"While it is true that occasional epileptic attacks, 
particularly in women, haye a central origin, yet 
physiological experiments have demonstrated the 
general truth of Marshall Hall's conclusion that epi- 
leptic paroxysms, like all reflex movements, are al- 
ways traceable to peripheral incitations. Upon this 
hint Dr. Brown-Sequard acted in that series of ex- 
periments that enabled him to disclose the existence 
of the unfelt aura in epileptic paroxysms, and to 
demonstrate the fact that irritation of the peripheral 
nerves arrests and prevents the attack in artificial 
epilepsy. Acting upon the same principle, Herzen 
and Lewison have been able to demonstrate that so 
long as irritation of the peripheral nerves is con- 
tinued, no reflex excitability of the spinal cord can 
occur. In a similar manner, in the only three in- 
stances in which I have been able to induce mediums 
to submit to the experiment, I have been able to ar- 
rest the supervention of the trance by peripheral 
irritation, thus demonstrating that, in these three 
instances at least, the phenomena were due to reflex 
excitability. In this manner, or upon this prin- 
ciple, M. Foissac was able, in the case of Pierre 
Cazot, to transform the convulsions of grand mal 
into the trance or larvated type of the attack. 

Nor will this hypothesis of the epileptic origin 
of these phenomena seem exceptional in the light 
of the facts, when it is considered that Niemeyer 
is proximately correct in stating the ratio of epilep- 
tic persons to the general population to be as one to 



PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. Id 

one hundred : ample verge here for spiritual me- 
diums by the score : and that, as the eminent Cal- 
meil was the first to prove, those fits of absence that 
Mr. Macnish so cleverly discusses in his paper on 
abstraction, particularly as respects the cases of Ho- 
garth, Dr. Robert Hamilton, the Rev. Dr. Harvest, 
and Prof. Warton, are really of epileptic nature and 
but semi-averted paroxysms — always ushered in, as 
Herpin observes, by scarcely perceptible shocks, but 
not attended with complete unconsciousness nor 
with the wdld initial cry that, once heard, can never 
be forgotten. In this aspect of the malady lies the 
solution of the dramatic case of M. Cazotte, and that 
of the equally dramatic case of Captain Densmore. 

Theoretically and observationally, therefore, it 
seems to me evident that the psychical phenomena 
associated with spiritualism are the exponents of 
nervous lesion ; also, that this lesion belongs to the 
epileptic type, to which as a centre is tethered a 
startling circle of weird sensorial impressions, and 
of apparently preternatural states of consciousness, in- 
volving in its nocturnal aspects premonitory dreams, 
and in its diurnal the elements of presentiment and 
prevision. And the strangest part of it all is, that 
our lives so often verify these dreams and premoni- 
tions as to disbar their relegation to the category of 
fortuitous coincidences. It is demonstrable, how- 
ever, that, so far from supporting the hypothesis of 
spiritual intervention, these phenomena lie strictly 
within the circle of nervous and cerebral disturb- 



1C2 PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 

ance ; that, therefore, their existence in any given 
case is in no way indicative of higher psychical organ- 
ization, as the exponents of spiritualism presume. 
On the other hand, they are constantly convertible 
with the more ordinary phenomena of epilepsy, con- 
stantly preceded by slight nervous shocks, and only 
occur as the exponents of nervous perversion, either 
hereditary or acquired. 

Furthermore : in studying the foregoing cases, 
the reader will observe that clairvoyance is the type 
of the psychical group. In the course of this in- 
quiry I have visited eleven different clairvoyant 
physicians and mediums, with a view to test the 
question whether the nervous shock preceded the 
psychical phenomenon. In four of these cases, the 
shock was so slight as to produce a barely percep- 
tible tremor ; in six, visible jerkings of the arm an- 
nounced the supervention of the state ; in one, in 
which I was unable to detect any external indica- 
tions, the medium confessed that a kind of nervous 
thrill and shudder invariably foreran the clairvoyant 
condition. 

I shall have to except from this generalization, 
however, cases of vision, like that of Mr. Mathews, 
in which, as the product of a sort of intellectual 
aura, preceding, as Falret well observes, the super- 
vention of the convulsions, the sensory impression 
heralds the attack or shock. One gentleman, sub- 
ject to attacks of grand mal, always sees just as the 
fit supervenes, but only with the left eye, a hideous 



PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 103 

black-and-red human figure, that gradually magni- 
fies as it moves toward him. Others see flames, 
fiery circles, red or purple objects ; or hear the sound 
of far-off bells, or voices repeating the same word 
over and over ; but by far the most frequent sen- 
sorial impression incident to this stage, and preceding 
the shock, is the ghost or phantom. Again, it not 
seldom happens that no convulsions occur, and then 
the fit is wholly represented by the mental aura and 
its consequent sensory impressions, without percep- 
tible nervous tremor. Lasting a few minutes, it is 
ushered in, not by unconsciousness, but by a strange 
sensation of passing suddenly from one world to 
another. This type — the fit of absence in its sub- 
tlest form — pretty accurately describes the case of 
Judge Edmonds, and merits perhaps the distinctive 
appellation of intellectual epilepsy. These impres- 
sions, variable as they are in individuals, reproduce 
themselves from fit to fit with singular uniformity ; 
yet that they in no way imply lesion of the optic 
nerves is exemplified in the case of the gentleman 
who saw the hideous black-and-red figure with the 
left eye, the vision of the right eye continuing nor- 
mal, although the ophthalmoscope was incompetent 
to detect the slightest difference between the left 
optic nerve and its fellow : so that it is evident that 
in these instances the impression is due to causes of 
cerebral origin, and that Falret is correct in denomi- 
nating the aura, whence these impressions spring, 
an intellectual aura. 



104: PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 

It requires an exceedingly acute eye, habituated 
to careful observation, to detect and finally trace to 
their source the symptoms indicative of this obscure 
form of the disorder. I have in my mind's eye, at 
this moment, a lady of intensely cerebral organiza- 
tion, with whom I was intimately acquainted for 
many months, and who in certain peculiar moods 
was a rampant spiritualist, while ordinarily skeptical 
on the subject — intimately acquainted for many 
months, before I detected the existence of a distinct 
periodicity in these moods, and on closer observa- 
tion was able to refer them to their cause. Natu- 
rally of keen and penetrative intellect, though imagi- 
native even to the verge of mysticism, in her more 
normal moments her acute insight rebelled against 
the doctrines of spiritualism, while in these attacks, 
with the morbid sensorial visions incident to them, 
mere denial of its tenets, however gently and cour- 
teously expressed, was productive of savage irrita- 
tion ; and thus she lived on in perpetual struggle 
between morbid spiritual day-dreams and higher 
and saner views of spiritual life. 

The conclusion is, then, that this form of spirit- 
seeing, as illustrated in the case of Judge Edmonds, 
is a true intellectual epilepsy, with paroxysms of 
varying duration, but seldom lasting more than a 
few minutes, though of frequent occurrence in the 
settled stages of the disorder. 

The extremer form of trance, as it occurs in cat- 
alepsy, and often in epileptic attacks, now calls for 
explanation. 



PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 105 

Taking into consideration the fact that true in- 
sanity is the exponent of a morbid condition of the 
gray matter of the brain, and the coincident fact 
that the cortex of the brain, or gray cerebral enve- 
lope, is the seat of consciousness, the physiology of 
this phenomenon is very apparent, strange as its 
psychic impressions often are. If the reader will 
trouble himself to follow the details of a dissection, 
he will observe that the medulla oblongata (or up- 
ward continuation of the spinal marrow) represents 
three pairs of bodies, united in a bulb, and resting in 
a fossa of bone. Of these, the two pyramidal bodies 
continue the two frontal threads of the spinal cord, 
and the two restiform bodies the two posterior 
threads. The two olivary bodies, consisting of gray 
matter thinly enveloped in white fibres, continue the 
gray matter of the spinal cord, and lie interior and 
partly lateral. Innumerable white fibres, springing 
from the restiform bodies and passing through masses 
of gray matter, curve backward, and expand into 
the two lobes of the cerebellum ; while innumerable 
pyramidal and olivary fibres, with perhaps a few 
restiform, curving forward and passing through the 
gray masses, traverse the great ganglia, and finally 
expand into the two hemispheres and six lobes of 
the cerebrum. 

According to Tiedemann, when these fibres 
emerge from the ganglia, they form a thin membra- 
nous fabric, which thickens as crescence of the or- 
ganism proceeds, and is at last doubled upon itself 



106 PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERYO-P8YCHIC SERIES. 

fold upon f old, thus forming the convolutions, which 
vary somewhat in number in the heads of different 
individuals, and in disorders of the hydrocephalic 
type, where the cranium is considerably enlarged, 
are occasionally absent altogether. Indeed, it is not 
very difficult to unravel the hemispheres of a recent- 
ly-formed brain, and expand them into membranes. 
Thus the sexif old spinal stem blossoms into the com- 
plex structure of a human brain. 1 

This cortical covering of the brain, consisting of 
cineritious and vesicular matter, is the seat of con- 
sciousness, and at various centres in it appear to 
originate those impulses of conscious volition that 

1 When I describe the gray neurine of the spinal cord (or its con- 
tinuation in the olivary bodies) as expanding into the cortex, or lam- 
ina forming the external envelope of the brain, I accept a presump- 
tion of numerous cerebral anatomists, but one that I have never been 
able to verify in actual dissection. On the other hand, though the 
gray matter of the column can be traced in continuous tracts to the 
corpora striata and the optic thalami, dissection offers no evidence, 
of a satisfactory kind, that it is structurally responsible for the cor- 
tex ; and, strictly speaking, the peripheral neurine of the cerebrum 
and cerebellum must be regarded as structurally distinct from the 
gray central matter of the spinal system, which is susceptible of re- 
ceiving impressions (without consciousness) and of reflex action of its 
own, apart from volition — in a word, is possessed of independent 
excito-motor properties. The nervous system of the unconscious life 
is thus completely separable from the laminated structure concerned 
in the phenomenon of consciousness, which may be hypothetically 
dissected from it, leaving intact, though unconscious in its operations, 
the whole sensory and motor organism. The force of this fact will 
appear by-and-by, when the unconscious volition concerned in a cer- 
tain class of so-called spiritual phenomena comes under discussion. 



PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 107 

constitute, in their varied relations to life, aptitudes 
and faculties. The great vital centres are the me- 
dullary and spinal ; the cerebellum is concerned in 
general muscular coordination ; the cerebrum, in 
cerebration, and in voluntary movements particular- 
ly pertaining to intellectual and emotional expres- 
sion. Electrical excitation of the brain and spinal 
cord, at the hands of Prof. Ferrier, has demon- 
strated several points of value in morbid psychol- 
ogy: 1. That the anterior lobes of the brain are 
the principal centres of voluntary motion and of 
the active external manifestation of intelligence; 
2. That the individual convolutions have the func- 
tions of distinct centres ; 3. That the action of the 
hemispheres is generally crossed, though certain 
movements of the mouth and tongue and neck are 
bilaterally coordinated ; 4. That certain portions of 
the brain give no muscular response to the current, 
and are probably appropriated to sensory phenomena 
and cognition. These unresponsive portions seem 
to be situated centrally and coronally. 1 

1 The intimacy of coordination that exists between the brain and 
the purely automatic physical functions is illustrated by many curi- 
ous facts. If, for example, the pons Yarolii, or medium of communi- 
cation between the two lobes of the cerebellum, be punctured with a 
sharp instrument, congestion of the lungs ensues. If, again, the 
floor of the fourth ventricle of the brain be punctured in the same 
manner, the kidneys secrete copiously of glucose, a common symp- 
tom in diabetes, and in the diabetes that accompanies nocturnal epi- 
lepsy. Illustrations of this special class might be quoted to the 
extent of pages ; but the result would be merely to establish that 
which physiological studies have rendered a non-debatable proposi- 



108 PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 

It is very evident, from these facts, that in the 
prof ounder order of trance, and in so-called cerebral 
lucidity, is implied a persistent reflex excitability of 
the gray sensory matter of the brain, during partial 
suspension of the medullary (vital) and motor centres ; 
and this view is supported by the fact that trance 

tion, namely, that to disturb the function of the brain, or that of 
any special nerve-centre, is to disturb the whole animal economy. 
If one point, upon which physiologists have thus far dwelt very spar- 
ingly, but which is, nevertheless, fundamental to thorough physiolo- 
gical investigation, is ever placed in its proper attitude by some mas- 
ter, like Dr. Carpenter, the importance of studying organism syn- 
thetically, as well as analytically, will be exhibited more clearly than 
it is in ordinary text-books, or even in special treatises. Let it be 
considered, as a starting-point, that all tissues, nervous, muscular, 
osseous, etc., are but transformations of a single primordial tissue 
as all types of organism have their origin in one primordial form, 
and the value of what may be styled synthetic physiology is lucidly 
manifest. Prom this aspect of the subject, the importance of medi- 
cal education to the professional physiologist needs only to be 
pointed out to be appreciated ; for it is only by observing the con- 
geries of results, that flow from the disturbance of particular func- 
tions, that these mutual relations of physical and psychical phenom- 
ena can be fully apprehended. So far as scientific investigation can 
penetrate, molecular force is the structural force and the study of 
molecular physics is the study of physics from the stand-point of 
structure. It will be long, probably, before scientists will be able to 
trace out, link by link, the vast series of transformations of tissue 
that enters into the complex structure of the human body ; but that 
the series will finally be traced out no careful journalist of scientific 
progress can reasonably doubt. Meanwhile, in order to appreciate 
the intimacy of relation that brain or nerve bears to muscle or bone, 
let it be remembered that all ultimately merge themselves in a 
mother-tissue, of which they are successive differentiations, and par- 
ticipate in the same molecular properties. 



PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 109 

develops heat in the coronal region of the cranium, 
and is generally followed by soreness at the back of 
the neck. This phenomenon involves, therefore, 
the supposition of lesion of the gray cognitive tract, 
and, when, through successive stages of nervous de- 
generation, fostered by morbid vanity, and partly by 
the morbid impulses it engenders, this sanctum of 
mind is attacked, the poor broken medium drifts 
rapidly in the direction of dementia ; still exulting, 
perhaps, in occasional glimpses of his lost lucidness, 
but generally tormented with the spectre of a life 
squandered in those sensory dreams in w^hich the 
literature of spiritualism is so abundant. 

The prevision occasionally involved in these mor- 
bid states of consciousness is the only element in them 
that seems to participate in the superhuman. To 
attempt explanation of this phenomenon, so familiar 
to medical psychologists, would be to dip deeper in- 
to speculative problems than limits at this stage per- 
mit. That which more especially differences man 
from the lower animals is imagination, employing 
the term to represent the cognitive and creative, the 
higher emotional energy of the soul. The true ar- 
tist, like the true poet, is prophetic, and discerns the 
beautiful that comes by-and-by in the imperfect 
beautiful that is. Our undeveloped lives are great- 
er than our lives developed. Our real man protests 
from the cradle to the grave against the littleness of 
the actual man; and, though a magnificent physique 
is a splendid promoter of skepticism, this our souls 



110 PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERYO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 

within themselves know : that our true real comes 
not by way of trances, but by way of honest endeav- 
or for the good. The beginning of spiritual revela- 
tion is action. Our beautiful is by toil, not by trance. 
Compassed about by the four baffling and terrible si- 
lences of whence and what, and why and whither, 
as our lives are, it is impossible to refuse a kind of 
sympathy to those who importune matter and mind 
for some answers to the riddle; but it is scarcely 
necessary to accept the answers of the oracle. Nor 
is it so essential to our spiritual culture that these 
silences should speak as to justify our acceptance of 
morbid nervous phenomena as revelations of the su- 
persensible. Our lives are not long enough to jug- 
gle with our problems at seances ', and, were they, 
our natures are so constituted that insincerity is 
akin to death. 

Yet I ought not, perhaps, so far as consistent with 
brevity, to shirk the task of explaining, or of offer- 
ing, aside from their etiology, some rational solu- 
tion, in more particular terms, of the phenomena of 
presentiment and premonitory dreams, which, as a 
curious fact, and a pretty constant one, seldom occur 
in cases where the vision of spirits is a dominant 
symptom, and constitute a group by themselves. 
In their bearing on psychological science, they may 
be regarded as furnishing inductive proof of Kant's 
doctrine of the ideality of time and space, absurd as 
it seems to the inductive thinker who has never been 
at the pains to collect and verify the facts. The 



PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES, m 

hypothesis of coincidence, so generally insisted upon 
as responsible for the verification of dreams of this 
class, breaks down under practical tests, such as were 

instituted in the cases of Emma L and Pierre 

Cazot, and have been instituted at large by Dr. 
Gieser. An unerring prevision certainly accompa- 
nies morbid nervous function in some cases, generally 
as an isolated exponent, dissociated from the ordi- 
nary psychical phenomena upon which the doctrines 
of spiritualism rest. In all the cases of prevision 
in dreams that I have been able to collect, as a con- 
stant law, the future presents itself as present to the 
dreamer, and as the vision of something actually 
taking place. No consciousness of time appears to 
be involved, and Dr. Gieser, in his curious museum 
of instances, mentions no exception to this rule. It 
is a notable fact, also, that in settled insanity, where 
the cortex of the brain (or lamina of consciousness) 
is affected, the idea of time is quite invariably absent. 
I knew and studied, some years since, the case of 
an old man who had been insane since he was twen- 
ty-one years of age, though at intervals he seemed 
lucid, but to the day of his death he was only twenty- 
one. Is there not, then, in view of these facts of 
morbid function of this special tract, a temptation 
to agree with Kant and Schopenhauer, and to regard 
time as a form of consciousness — as that law of nor- 
mal function by virtue of which the future seems 
to have no existence as a form of being, except as 
potential in the present ? And, if this be so, then 



112 PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERVO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 

our lives are all embedded in a being that knows no 
time and no space, and answers the ancient definition 
of eternity : " JEtemitas non est temporis fine suc- 
cession sed nunc stansP It should be noted, also, as 
the constant exponent of clairvoyance, that the dis- 
tant presents itself as visible and actually present to 
the inner sight, or, if the term may be permitted, to 
the cerebral vision. This phenomenon of vision is, 
let me add, invariably associated with the superficial 
lamina of gray nervous tissue enveloping the cere- 
bral ganglia, as a congeries of motor and sensory 
centres. Now, is not the absence of time and space 
as forms of consciousness in the deeper types of 
trance, and the partial absence of the latter in its 
less pronounced types, a fact of great value, not only 
as indicative of the main source of the intelligence 
accompanying these states, but in its bearing on 
scientific psychology, particularly as regards the ques- 
tion suggested by Spinoza (" Cogitata Metaphysi- 
ca," 0. 4), and exhaustively discussed by Kant — with 
what result has been intimated % For it shows that 
the permanence of time and space, as forms of con- 
sciousness, is uniquely dependent on integrity of 
cerebral function, and that they are specially absent 
in instances of morbid function of the cortex as an 
almost invariable rule ; the future presenting itself 
as existing in the form of present fact, and the dis- 
tant as a subject of vision. Strange as these laws 
of morbid psychical phenomena may seem to those 
who have not given particular attention to the sub- 



PHYSIOLOGY OF THE NERYO-PSYCHIC SERIES. 113 

ject, they are nevertheless stated as the results of ob- 
servations careful and extensive enough to establish 
them as strict inductions of science. My own view 
of the case is, that, in molecular disturbances of 
the nervous system, its peculiar activities become en 
rapport with molecular forces operating externally, 
accepting and correlating as intelligence vibrations 
not cognizable at all under ordinary circumstances. 
It must be remembered, in support of this view, 
that molecular force is the parent of all forces con- 
cerned in natural phenomena, and the source of all 
organic transformations — the final link between sec- 
ondary forces and the great First Cause of things. 
And if time and space are only forms of conscious- 
ness, then cause and effect are only forms of con- 
sciousness. 

If it is now clear that the etiology of this series 
of phenomena is to be sought in a true nervous le- 
sion, a more striking, though really less important, 
series demands attention. 



NERVE-ATMOSPHERE AND ITS AGENCY IN NERVO 
MOLECULAR PHYSICS. 

Before entering upon the nervo-dynamic series, 
it is proper to direct the reader's attention to certain 
problems in molecular physics, or to certain facts, 
rather, which lie within the horizon of this investi- 
gation, and are essential to a just estimate of its 
scientific relations. The term aura has thus far been 
employed in its general definition ; what that is the 
reader will gather from its derivation, and from its 
classical usage, as designating, a nymph of the air, 
or from its mediaeval, to designate the halo of light 
about the heads and faces of saints. 

The series of experiments by a German savant, 
now nearly forgotten, that resulted in the discovery 
of odic force (pd\ not only illustrate the nature and 
operations of this element, but also indicate its re- 
lation to the nervo-dynamic phenomena associated 
with spiritualism. These experiments were con- 
ducted principally with persons subject to attacks of 
catalepsy, by the agency of whose thrice-acute nerves 
it was first ascertained that from the poles of an 



NERVE-ATMOSPHERE H5 

open magnet were constantly sliot two luminous 
tongues of flame, visible to persons of exceedingly 
sensitive nervous organization. The luminous tufts 
emitted from the poles of a large magnet, capable 
of lifting ninety pounds, were described as some- 
what less than a foot in length, and iridescent and 
flickering. To test whether these phenomena were 
real, the experimenter prepared a very sensitive 
plate in the same manner as for the camera of a 
photographer, and placed it in a box impervious to 
light, facing the poles of a large open magnet. On 
the third day the plate was removed and subjected 
to the action of mercurial vapor. It had been dis- 
tinctly affected, as by light ; while a similar plate, 
prepared in the same manner, under conditions ex- 
actly the same, less the magnet, was totally unaffect- 
ed at the expiration of the same period — to be exact, 
sixty-four hours. 

The operator now extended his experiments, and 
ascertained that the points of crystals emitted flames 
visible to cataleptics, and described by them as re- 
sembling tulip-blossoms. On the other hand, amor- 
phous bodies, as was demonstrated by many experi- 
ments, presented no similar optical phenomena. 

But the more important aspect of the series was 
this: that magnets and crystals, in common with 
amorphous bodies, and indeed all substances, emit- 
ted a subtile aura, capable of acting on the nerves of 
a cataleptic at considerable distances, so as to pro- 
duce spasms, and susceptible of transmission through 



116 NERVE-ATMOSPHERE AND ITS AGENCY 

conducting media. Thus, when a large magnet was 
placed six paces from: the feet of an invalid lady, and 
the arm removed, she fell into tetanic convulsions, 
and became unconscious. "When, again, the arm was 
replaced, she recovered consciousness. Another lady, 
also cataleptic, instantly detected the proximity of 
an open magnet that had been secretly introduced 
into an adjacent room. It was, in like manner, as- 
certained that certain bodies powerfully attracted 
the hands of cataleptics, even in the unconsciousness 
of the fit ; and that certain other bodies were, under 
similar circumstances, hurled violently from the 
hand, that member remaining, after the act, firmly 
fixed in its new position. The bearing of these facts 
upon the genesis of phantom phenomena will appear 
by-and-by. 

By frequent repetition of these experiments some 
of the laws of this new activity of bodies were ascer- 
tained, and a real contribution to progress in this di- 
rection was made, though one that has been prolific 
of speculative, and barren of practical results. This 
one point, however, is pertinent to nervous physi- 
ology, namely, that certain bodies, even at a consid- 
erable distance, may act powerfully as peripheral in- 
citations in nervous disorders of the epileptic type, 
and that their specific influences are susceptible of 
transmission for several hundred feet, and of affect- 
ing the nerves at that distance. The intimate recip- 
rocal relation that exists between the nervous system 
and the molecular constitutions of environing bodies 



IN NERVO-MOLECULAR PHYSICS. H? 

— a relation impalpable to the senses, but not the 
less real — could scarcely be better illustrated than 
by this series. Our lives are environed with molecu- 
lar influences, that enter into our deepest intuitions 
of the constitution of matter, and assist, uncon- 
sciously to ourselves, in determining our profound- 
est philosophical conceptions and our subtlest psychi- 
cal impressions. 

Again, the specific molecular influences of differ- 
ent bodies are correlated with motion, and may be 
transformed into tangible activities ; activities so far 
removed from our ordinary conceptions of the con- 
ditions under which motion is produced, yet so 
demonstrably though invisibly determined by molec- 
ular influences, as to suggest a series of intelligences 
ill apparently lumpish and inactive masses of matter. 

An experiment first instituted by Dr. Leger, of 
London, and verified by the celebrated Dr. Philips, 
of Paris, bears on this point with singular felicity. 

Placing a carafe firmly in a wooden socket, the 
circular limb of the vase engaged in a rainure or 
groove, from a disk of copper that closes the throat 
of the vase is dropped a tube of the same metal, 
and to the disengaged end of this is fixed an arm or 
bar (of copper also), furnished at one extremity with 
a bullet or other weight, so as to balance, and at 
the other with a linen thread dropped a little dis- 
tance and weighted with an olive de cire so as to 
form a very delicate pendulum within the belly of 
the carafe, insulated alike from atmospheric and elec- 



118 NERVE-ATMOSPHERE AND ITS AGENCY 

trical currents, and firmly protected from possible 
tremor of the finger by an exact fit of the disk to 
the throat of the vase. 

Now place the index-finger of the right hand on 
the upper surface of the disk, and at the same mo- 
ment take a morsel of sulphur in the palm of the 
left. The pendulum is still immovable, and remains 
so for a few seconds ; but an invisible motor is creep- 
ing along the copper conductor, enveloping by de- 
grees the tube and the bar, and at last descending 
the linen thread, at the end of which is suspended 
the bit of wax, at liberty. The wax olive now trem- 
bles, oscillates at last, and finally assumes a contin- 
uous rotary motion which enlarges in diameter until 
it attains a fixed limit, proportionate to the volume 
of the sulphur. This it maintains with constant pre- 
cision from left to right. 

If, now, the sulphur be replaced with a piece of 
silver, the pendulum gradually returns to rest as the 
motor is exhausted ; but, as the aura of the silver 
suffuses the disk, the tube, and the olive, the latter 
trembles again, begins to swing, and describes a new 
circle, that enlarges in proportion to the volume of 
the silver. But the motion in this instance is from 
right to left. Renew the experiment with a piece 
of soap, and the motion produced is not rotary, but 
a swing, the scope of which is proportionate to the 
volume, from northeast to southwest. The result in 
these experiments, which are the same, however fre- 
quently repeated, would not in the least be affected 



IN NERYO-MOLECULAR PHYSICS. H9 

by inclosing the sulphur, silver, or soap, in a porce- 
lain box, or by insulating it from the hand in any 
other available manner. 1 

The relation of these experiments to so-called 

1 M. Philips draws the following general conclusions from his 
experiments with the instruments invented by Dr. Leger : 

" 1. Le mouvement que V application oVune substance determine 
dans le pendule magnet oscope est toujours le meme en nature et en 
amplitude, quel que soit le volume actuellement employe de cette sub- 
stance. Axnsi Vemploi des globules homeopathiques produit un effet 
entierement semblable d celui de la substance elle-meme, employee en 
nature, dont ces globules portent le nom. 

" 2. Un etat d'isolement complet, realise entre le corps de Vexperi- 
menteur et la substance en experimentation par des substances etran- 
geres ne possedant en elles aucune influence 'marquee sur le pendule, 
rt alter e point sensiblement les effets obtenus lors du contact immediat. 
Par exemple, dans la premiere experience que fai citee il importer ait 
peu, pour le residtat final, que le soufre fut d nu dans la main ou quHl 
y fut place dans une boite de bois blanc ou dans un bocal de porcelaine, 
celui-ci fut-il hermetiquement clos" 

In facts like these, and in the consideration of their bearing upon 
the laws of organization, or their final transformation into such laws, 
the reader is enabled to appreciate how narrow is the boundary that 
separates organic from inorganic matter — the non-living from the 
lowest forms of the living. It is true that the cause which deter- 
mines the growth of organic beings is still a mystery; but it is 
known that the materials of which such beings consist are subject 
to the same laws as mineral matter, and that the complexity is trace- 
able to the peculiar qualities of the carbon ; and the careful student 
of science is scarcely at liberty to doubt that the secret will at last 
be discovered. The idea of life, as an esse, is obsolete, and must 
necessarily be abandoned in favor of a system regarding it as a posse 
of organic matter. Speaking scientifically, there are as many forms 
of life as there are kinds of organic tissue ; and when Schelling gave 
his definition of life, as the tendency (in matter) to individuation, he 
limly anticipated Herbert Spencer's great law of differentiation. 



120 NERVE-ATMOSPHERE AND ITS AGENCY 

spirit-photography, and to other performances assimi- 
lated to the thaumaturgy of the ancients, I shall not 
stop to elucidate, as these feats are not of a kind 
that can properly pretend to psychic significance; 
although let it be, remarked en passant that the 
priests of all the ancient mysteries and oracles, from 
the Egyptian to the Roman, and in the middle ages 
pupils in thaumaturgy, were selected upon the same 
principle as spiritual mediums to-day, namely, by 
their susceptibility to the phenomenon of trance — in 
other words, because they were epileptics. M. Sal- 
verte is in error in his assumption that the most im- 
posing feats of the thaumaturgists were experiments 
in physics. On the contrary, they dip as profoundly 
into the department of nervo-molecular physics as 
the feats of Mr. Home, Mr. Foster, or Miss Fox ; 
and there is little that is new in modern spiritualism, 
except its name, as careful students of the religious 
literature of the ancient pagan races, and of the lit- 
erature of thaumaturgy and magic, need not be re- 
minded. 

Thus far the subject of aura in its general as- 
pects, in which apparently and to the senses inert 
bodies exhibit properties akin to psychic in their 
mysterious operations. 

The subject of nerve-aura is more difficult to 
elucidate, because less susceptible of experiment. 
That it is capable of transmission through conduct- 
ing media, and of acting at considerable distances 
through the medium of the atmosphere, is proved 



IN NERVO-MOLECULAR PHYSICS. 121 

by the facts of mesmerism and by large classes of 
facts collected by medical psychologists; and that 
it is more or less subject to the volition of the 
organism whence it proceeds, and partakes of voli- 
tional properties, is equally indisputable. 

"When, in 1784, the celebrated Jussieu, of the 
commission appointed by the Academy of Sciences 
to investigate the phenomena of mesmerism, finally 
reported on the subject in a masterly document, the 
lucid analysis and candor of which have too seldom 
been emulated by scientific men, separating the phe- 
nomena into four groups, the first admitting of phys- 
iological explanation, the second militating against 
the theory of animal magnetism, the third attribut- 
able to the imagination, and the fourth involving 
the presumption of a special agency in their produc- 
tion, he not only paved the way for the investiga- 
tions that have resulted in the discovery of nerve- 
aura, but gave a fillip to the scientific mind in that 
special direction. 

As to the nature of this element there is little 
coincidence of opinion among scientific men. That 
it is not identical with electricity, though correlated 
with it, with light, and with other forces, Helm- 
holtz has substantially proved, in demonstrating that 
the transmission of voluntary impulse from the 
brain to the muscles is far less rapid than electrical 
transmission, and is perceptibly quickened in rapidi- 
ty by heat, and lessened by cold. It is susceptible 
of sensory impression and capable of propagating 
6 



122 NERVE-ATMOSPHERE AND ITS AGENCY 

the impulses of the will ; but it is also susceptible 
of unconscious action, as illustrated in the impor- 
tant case of Mary Carrick, The term aura as it re- 
relates to nerve-tissue is, therefore, as in the instance 
of drugs and medicines, appropriated to an emanat- 
ing atmosphere having the molecular properties, 
motor and sensory, of nervous tissue itself, though 
in lessened intensity. 

How sensory impressions are propagated and 
motor impulses transmitted, is a question upon 
which, again, there is little coincidence among sci- 
entific men. In my own case, in one instance of 
well-marked clairvoyance, though within small pe- 
riphery, occasioned by fever, I was distinctly con- 
scious of being enveloped in a peripheral sensory 
aura, and that my impressions of environing objects 
originated in this aura ; and in testing or question- 
ing clairvoyant physicians and mediums, three out 
of seven, who had any recollection at all of what 
they saw or said in the clairvoyant state, confessed 
that their impressions seemed to come in this man- 
ner, the remaining four asserting that, though dimly 
conscious, they saw and said things as in a dream, 
and could not distinctly recall them. . 

It is as nearly certain, however, as the only prox- 
imately demonstrable by experiment can be, that all 
sensations or impressions coming by way of the op- 
tic, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and peripheral 
nerves, are reflex representatives and equivalents in 
consciousness for molecular vibrations emanating 



IN NERVO-MOLECULAR PHYSICS. 123 

from the bodies of which cognition is taken, and 
that the impressions received in the clairvoyant state 
have the same origin; though in the deeper and 
more interior order of trance, into which it finally 
develops, reflex excitability of the gray matter of 
the brain appears to be responsible for the visions so 
often described. I have no doubt that this existed 
in Poe's case, and was the principal element in those 
unearthly imaginings that occur in his weirder and 
more spiritual tales, though present limits preclude 
collation of the evidences tending to establish it ; 
and Dr. J. G. Holland recently called my attention 
to a strange and spectral painting, executed in an in- 
terval of unconsciousness, that betrays similar traits 
of imagination. 

But to return. The part that nerve-atmosphere 
plays in society and in life is important, though little 
comprehended. How else is it possible to account 
for the singular ascendency that persons of inferior 
intellect and ability often gain over persons of ex- 
ceeding intellectual and moral superiority. Upon 
what other hypothesis can be explained the strange 
intimacy that subsisted between the intellectual He- 
gel and stupid Henry Beer, with his thousands of 
dollars invested in walking-sticks? The idol of 
Germany with a fool for his Pylades, to the laughter 
of all Berlin. True that Heyne, with his acute per- 
ception of the sarcastic aspects of the intimacy, re- 
fers it to another cause, namely, that, Beer being a 
fool, the philosopher could talk to him without dan- 



124 NERVE-ATMOSPHERE AND ITS AGENCY 

ger of being comprehended ; true that Heyne was 
tolerably well acquainted with. Hegel. But yet his 
observations on this point, as elsewhere, where it is 
possible to turn a sarcasm, must be taken cum grano 
salis. 

Our likings and our antagonisms, our inexplica- 
ble antipathies against some, our inexplicable attrac- 
tion to others, are not subject to considerations of 
moral or intellectual altitude. I like this man, with 
no moral or intellectual reason for liking him. I 
dislike the other, with as little good reason for dis- 
liking him. Indeed, the liking often coexists with 
moral turpitude and unreliability, and the dislike 
with moral rectitude. I regard these phenomena, 
though some refer them to intuition, as simple ner- 
vous impressions. In the course of a lounge down 
Broadway, I walk through the nervous atmospheres 
of a thousand persons. They impress me dimly. 
This one repels, that one attracts ; but, had I the 
nervous organization of a Zschok'ke, I would read 
the souls of these men and women like so many 
diaries of their daily lives. 

I have observed and been impressed by this at- 
mosphere in the persons of criminals to a greater 
extent than with any other class ; and this agrees 
with the remark of Dr. Maudsley, that criminals as 
a rule are subjects of nervous disorder — how often 
of the reflex type is proved by the statistical obser- 
vation that one criminal in a hundred is the victim 
of pronounced epilepsy. I could not sit within ten 



IN NERV0-M0LECULAR PHYSICS. 125 

feet of an habitual criminal in a Fifth -Avenue 
parlor, without knowing it; and there are men 
whom I know to be insane, notwithstanding the 
fact that they are elegantly-dressed Broadway prom- 
enaders. 

These things are not fancies. On the contrary, 
in conversation with an insanity expert recently, I 
was enabled to compare my own observations with 
those of a master in morbid psychology, and to dis- 
cern the importance of nerve-aura as a factor in the 
determination of this class of cases. The question 
was this : " In those instances in which, so far as im- 
pulsive and morbid acts are concerned, the subject of 
an examination presents no indisputable evidences 
of insanity, upon what grounds is one person re- 
mitted to the hospital, while another is adjudged 
simply eccentric % " In other w T ords, in the cases of 
two persons, both apparently inhabitants of the 
border-land, upon what evidence is it concluded that 
the one has passed the boundary of sanity and that the 
other has not ? It is impossible to dissect the brain 
of either, and the mental and physical symptoms 
are perhaps parallel. Substantially the answer of 
the expert amounted to this : " I feel that the one 
subject is insane and that the other is not " — a reply 
apparently equivalent to saying that he knew in- 
sanity by intuition, but really scientific in its terms. 
In other words, to untangle a paradox, the decision 
in these cases is largely due to the nervous aura 
of the subject. The same act, the same mental ep- 



126 NERVE-ATMOSPHERE AND ITS AGENCY - 

centricity, may be sane in one man and insane in 
another. 

Again, all organic structures have their special 
forms of nerve-aura. The evidences that support 
this hypothesis are so varied and indisputable, that 
it is now conceded by scientific men. Certain spe- 
cies of serpents, for example, are capable of fasci- 
nating birds and animals, as was long since indicated 
by the observations of Dr. Good, Prof. Silliman, 
Dr. Barrow, the South American traveler, and M. 
Yaillant and Mr. Bruce, the African explorers. Ne- 
groes can, it has been observed, detect the presence 
of a rattlesnake at the distance of three hundred 
feet, by the diffusion, says an eminent Carolinian 
observer, of an exceedingly attenuated ether that 
acts benumbingly on the nervous system. Vice 
versa, Mr. Bruce, from minute personal observation, 
distinctly states that the negroes of Sennaar are so 
armed by nature that they handle scorpions and 
vipers with perfect impunity; and Lindekranz, .a 
Swedish savant of eminence, affirms that the natives 
of Lapland and Dalarne subdue dogs in the same 
mysterious manner. " I constantly observed," says 
the former, explaining the physiology of the pro- 
cess, " that, however active the viper was before he 
was laid hold of, he seemed to sicken and become 
torpid, often shutting his eyes, and never turning 
his fangs toward the arm of the person that held 
him." 

I have constantly observed that epileptics, pend- 



IN NERVO-MOLECULAR PHYSICS. 127 

ing the incubation of the fit, appear to be enveloped 
in a sensitive and highly-excited nerve-atmosphere, 
which, sometimes accompanied with sullenness, but 
not seldom with exceeding sensory exaltation and 
with preternatural acuteness of perception, heralds 
the attack, or, when transformed into the larvated 
type by mesmeric passes, eventuates in clairvoyance 
and trance. 

These data support the hypothesis that all ner- 
vous organisms emit an ethereal aura susceptible of 
control by consciousness, of transmission in a given 
direction at the will of the organism, and of trans- 
lation into physical phenomena under given condi- 
tions. Many of those strange disturbances of the 
equilibrium of objects within their sphere, observed 
to occur in nervous maladies, are no doubt due to 
this element. I have seen persons, subject to ner- 
vous paroxysms, upset a glass of water without con- 
tact. Under ordinary circumstances, the balance be- 
tween the bundle of forces represented by a man 
and those represented by the inorganic bodies that 
environ him, is more or less stable. On the other 
hand, in disorders of the epileptic type the auras 
of various bodies act powerfully as peripheral inci- 
tations, the nervous aura of the invalid acting with 
reciprocal energy on them. The force of this point 
will appear more particularly, if the reader will care- 
fully study the case of Mary Carrick, which, as ex- 
hibiting both series of phenomena incident to spirit- 
ualism, the nervo-psychic and the nervo-dynamic, in 



128 NERVE-ATMOSPHERE AND ITS AGENCY 

nearly equal proportions, must be regarded as a typi- 
cal instance. 

I have memoranda of the case of a celebrated 
medium named Conklin, subject to well-marked at- 
tacks of cerebral epilepsy, with its faded and blood- 
suffused eye, cadaverous pallor, and heavy and lost 
expression, who illustrated the phenomenon of ner- 
vous atmosphere, and the disturbances of surrounding 
objects incident to the malady, to a greater extent 
than any person I have ever met. He had made 
considerable stir in Washington by predicting the 
assassination of Mr. Lincoln, and appeared at Dod- 
worth Hall, New York, with a transcript of trance- 
observations of lunar scenery, interlarded with trance 
seances / but, owing to feebleness of physical organ- 
ization, he did not excel in dynamic phenomena, 
though disturbances of the lesser sort, and particu- 
larly rappings, were generally present as the ex- 
ponents of the clairvoyant state. I saw a glass of 
water fall from the desk at Dodworth Hall on one 
occasion, when he certainly was not within six feet 
of it, and no other person was within ten. 

Dr. Wood, of Somers, Connecticut, a cautious 
scientific observer, also states that on one occasion he 
took the opportunity to test the clairvoyance of a 
young woman giving seances in that town, who, fol- 
lowing the hegemony of his mind, described his own 
study with exceeding accuracy of detail, even to the 
finding of the skeleton in the closet ; giving the 
titles of medical works, describing the binding of 



IN NERVO-MOLECULAR PHYSICS. 129 

different volumes, and exhibiting other indications, of 
equally minute description, that she was in perfect 
rapport, not only with him, but with other persons 
within a given periphery. 

Dr. Patterson, of Virginia, relates the case of a 
lady subject to attacks of catalepsy and lying in 
trance, who, one stormy night, when her physician 
was not expected, insisted that she saw him away off 
riding on horseback through the rain, and tracked 
him step by step thence to the door, the attendants 
taking it for granted that she was dreaming until a 
rap was heard, the door was opened, and he walked 
in dripping. 

These facts, to which medical psychologists can 
add by the volume, carefully attested and collated, 
intimate, not only that the solution of the phenom- 
enon known as transfer of state, or as being en rap- 
port, lies in the investigation of the nature of nerve- 
atmosphere, but that the nervo-molecular phenomena 
incident to the seances of Mr. Home are due to the 
same mysterious agency, acting in mediums of vital 
temperament and of powerful physique with an 
energy that approximates to the superhuman. 

There is nothing so very singular about this. 
Every act of our lives is a transformation of nervous 
force into motor ; and that nervous force may be 
correlated into light is demonstrated by abundant 
facts. Phosphorescent animals become so under an 
impulse of the will, through the agency of the ner- 
vous system, evolving light as a transformation of its 



130 NERVE-ATMOSPHERE AND ITS AGENCY 

energy ; and in some cases of consumption, witnesses 
that distinguished physician, Dr. Brown-Sequard, 
light appears at the head of the sufferer, and may 
even radiate from him into the room. I doubt, 
however, whether this occurs in cases where no 
latent neurosis exists, to be developed by the de- 
bility incident to the disorder. 

The special origin of the sensory and motor aura 
concerned in these phenomena remains to be indi- 
cated. That the convulsions of epilepsy are due to 
reflex excitability of the nerve-centres has long been 
established. Dr. Hughlings-Jackson took another 
step in advance when he propounded the hypothesis 
that these nervous currents or shocks are generated 
by a lesion of the centres involving the phenomenon 
of sudden and explosive liberation of the nervous 
energy. This view of the origin of the shock has 
since been demonstrated by electrical excitation of 
the brain in a series of experiments carried on by 
Prof. Terrier, of London ; so that it is now evident 
that epilepsy carries with it the notion of molecular 
disturbance of the nervous system, and, through this, 
of alterations in its molecular constitution. It is 
specifically a nervous malady, and may coexist with 
great physical strength. 

In this molecular disturbance of the nerve-centres, 
spinal or cerebral, with its periodical shocks and its 
currents of liberated nerve-force, must be sought, if 
physiological observation is not at fault, the special 
origin of the motor and sensory nerve-atmosphere 



IN NERVO-MOLECULAR PHYSICS. 131 

concerned in the seances of mediums. That this re- 
flex excitability may be induced by volition in cases 
where the predisposition exists, there is no doubt. 
Nor is there any doubt that it may be transformed 
into a nervous habit, to be, within certain limits, in- 
dulged in at will of the psychic ; but, on the other 
hand, a period answering to the period of incuba- 
tion must always, so far as I have observed, inter- 
vene between the seances, and during this period the 
medium's will and fixedness of attention are incapa- 
ble of producing the fit. 

Before entering upon the nervo-dynamic series 
described by Prof. Crookes as incident to the seances 
of Mr. Home and Miss Fox, let me, in conclusion, 
remind the reader that clairvoyance with its periph- 
eral nerve-atmosphere is the constant exponent of 
the type of organization necessary to become a me- 
dium. Let it be observed also that in mediums of 
powerful physique it is invariably accompanied by 
the dynamic series, while in those of more cephalic 
type it rapidly develops into the deeper order of trance. 
Within the circle of my own observation I find not 
a single exception to this rule, and I have notes per- 
sonally jotted of over fifty mediums, including Mr. 
Home, Mr. Foster, A. J. Davis, Miss Fox, Miss 
Emma Hardinge, a dozen women famous in trances, 
and thrice as many men famous in the same walk. 

Let the reader now bear in mind the general 
relations previously developed between persons of 
epileptic tendency and the auras of environing bod- 



132 NERVE-ATMOSPHERE AND ITS AGENCY 

ies ; also, that the dynamic series commenced with the 
simple molecular phenomena of rappings and table- 
tipping, and has been developed by regular grada- 
tions from the levitation of bodies to luminous 
clouds, and from luminous clouds to phantom-hands 
and molecular spectres, with pencils without hands 
writing messages by the way. 

Let him remember that, though subsensible, ob- 
servation and experiment seem alike to indicate that 
nerve-aura is material — an imponderable nervous 
ether, possibly related to the odyle (odic gas) not 
long since announced by a celebrated observer as an 
element of organic structures. It is thus at once a 
force and a medium, susceptible of control by the 
will of the operator, and capable of sensory impres- 
sion : an atmosphere to take shape at his command, 
and to dissolve the moment the volition ceases, or, 
when the habit of the medium's will has become 
fixed in that direction, to come and pass in visible 
apparitions, without conscious subjective impulse on 
his part. Here, then, is the subsensible medium 
infolding me like a spirit, that may be caused to 
reflect the wildest imaginings of my own soul. And 
here let me venture to suggest — but only to suggest, 
for my observations have not been extensive enough 
to confirm it — that many of the hallucinations of 
madness, and of epileptic mania in particular, so far 
from being utterly unreal, are phantom-forms origi- 
nated in this peripheral aura by the morbid impulses 
of the fit, and analogous in origin to Mr Home's ap- 



IN NERVO-MOLECULAR PHYSICS. 133 

paritions, which, with his thrice-acute perception, the 
madman sees, though they are invisible to less ex- 
cited nerves. Not often, perhaps, is this the case ; 
but I have no doubt that this same subtile atmosphere 
is responsible for now and then a tale of goblin or 
of ghost. I know one madman who, in the exacer- 
bations of his fit, always sees his own face a few feet 
from him, mocking his contortions. That you and 
I cannot see it, by no means proves that it is not 
there, but that the madman's eye is superhuman in 
its sight. 



VL 

MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

Though singularly adapted to captivate the pop- 
ular imagination and to impress the nerves, this 
series seems to me less important than the nervo- 
psychic series, because its facts are in their nature 
more nearly allied to feats practised by the ancient 
magicians and thaumaturgists. For example, few of 
the feats of Mr. Home exceed those attested of Pir- 
netti, a famous conjurer, who appeared at St. Peters- 
burg early in the present century. This Pirnetti, 
on the occasion of his first seance before the Czar 
Alexander, was a little dramatic in his method. The 
hour set was seven o'clock. Five minutes after 
seven, and no Pirnetti. A quarter past — no Pir- 
netti. Half-past seven, and no Pirnetti. Messen- 
gers went, and returned unsuccessful. The czar 
waxed wrathful, but no Pirnetti. At last, as all the 
clocks in the palace were about to strike eight, the 
door opened, and Pirnetti was announced and walked 
in with the serenity of a punctual conjurer. The 
emperor was just about to indulge in a burst of 



MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 135 

wrath, when Pirnetti took the initiative with the 
question — 

" Did not your majesty command my presence 
at exactly seven o'clock ? " 

" Just so ! "responded the exasperated czar. 

" Well, then/ 5 said the conjurer, quietly, " let 
your majesty deign to consult your dial, and you will 
see that I am exact, and that it is just seven o'clock." 

The czar consulted his dial, and was amazed. 
The hands marked exactly seven. All the courtiers 
did so in their turn, and it was seven. All the clocks 
in the palace were at the seven. Anger was suc- 
ceeded by admiration. 

"Your majesty will pardon me," said Pirnetti. 
" I was desirous of making an impression. If you 
will consult again, you will find the hands marking 
the real hour." 

And every dial in the palace, from that in the 
czar's pocket and those in the pockets of the assem- 
bled courtiers to the great clocks with silver faces, 
indicated a few minutes past eight. As he was 
about leaving, having performed other equally as- 
tonishing feats, the emperor reminded Pirnetti that 
he had boasted that he could penetrate anywhere. 

" So I can, your majesty," replied the conjurer. 

" Very well," said the czar, " at twelve o'clock 
to-morrow I shall have ready in my closet one thou- 
sand rubles ; come and get them ; but I forewarn 
you that the doors shall be closed and carefully 
guarded." 



136 MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

" To-morrow, at noon, I shall have the honor of 
presenting myself before your majesty," said Pir- 
netti, and withdrew. 

The gentlemen of the house followed the con- 
jurer to see that he quitted the palace, accompanied 
him to his lodgings, and caused the house to be sur- 
rounded by a cordon of the police the moment he 
entered. The palace was instantly closed, with 
orders to suffer no one to enter until the czar com- 
manded it. High dignitaries held every avenue to 
the emperor, and all the palace keys were carried 
into the imperial cabinet and locked up. A few 
minutes before twelve the minister of the police 
announced by message that Pirnetti had not left 
home. 

Twelve o'clock sounded, but, while the last stroke 
reverberated, the door between the bedroom of the 
czar and his cabinet opened, and Pirnetti appeared. 

He concluded his feats by leaving St. Peters- 
burg, which then had fifteen gates, at all the gates 
at ten o'clock exactly. That he did so was declared 
by hosts of spectators who knew him by sight, and 
attested by the written declarations of .the officers 
placed at the gates to inspect the passports of travel- 
ers. And the inscription of his passports was in- 
scribed in the fifteen registers. 

I relate this remarkable but well-attested story, 
because it serves to indicate the perfection to which 
conjuring has been carried, and to suggest the limits 
that should naturally govern inquiry into the nature 



MEHOKANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 137 

of phenomena called spiritual. Prof. Crookes will 
probably reply that Pirnetti was a psychic ; but, as 
he made no pretense to be more than a conjurer, it 
is safe to accept him at his own valuation, and scien- 
tific men cannot be justly called upon to explain 
that which pretends to no spiritual altitude. I shall, 
on this principle, omit considering all feats, like the 
unbinding of mediums tied with ropes, that have 
the flavor of trickery, or mere sleight of hand. * 

Excluding the army of jugglers who make a pro- 
fession of curious feats in the name of spiritualism, 

1 The really important phenomena associated with spiritualism 
are not the dynamic feats and the strange transformations incident 
to the seances of mediums, but those involving the presumption of 
superhuman intelligence. The former have been known for ages, 
and are definitively associated with the magic and mysteries of the 
ancients, to say nothing of jugglery in its more modern aspects ; and 
one is scarcely called upon to explain that which is confessedly illu- 
sive. On the other hand, the more difficult series, dipping deep into 
the laws of life and into the profounder problems of medical psy- 
chology, presents facts worth the attention of the scientific inquirer, 
though the pretense of regarding them as a basis for religion has led 
scientific men to doubt their authenticity, and repelled them from an 
investigation abundant in materials calculated to result in a deeper 
comprehension of the import of psychology as a science. Hence, in 
this treatise, I have, in the main, disregarded mere tours de force on 
the part of mediums, and addressed myself to the class involving 
psychic facts of a type more or less inexplicable from the stand-point 
of the general observer, and susceptible of explanation only by spe- 
cial study and careful examination in all their details. It would, 
undoubtedly, be pleasant to the general reader to find in these pages 
some explanation of the various trickeries habitual to mediums of a 
certain class, but it would conduce nothing to the scientific value of 
this work. 



138 MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

the observed phenomena, under this series, fall nat- 
urally into six classes : 

Class I. — The movement of heavy bodies, either 
with or without muscular contact, is a phenomenon 
now so well known as to preclude the necessity of 
annoting special instances. On one occasion, when 
a circle had been formed and several mediums were 
present, a slight quivering of the room was percep- 
tible to the senses ; but, generally, articles of furni- 
ture give the responses. 

Class II. — This, one of the earliest developed, 
is known under the general name of rappings. They 
pertain to every medium I have observed, but vary 
considerably in quality and rhythm with differ- 
ent mediums. I have experimented on this class 
with a thin mahogany table upon which fine sand 
was sprinkled. With the medium seated at the end, 
his hands resting lightly on the table, in ten minutes 
after the experiment commenced, waves of molecu- 
lar vibration, proceeding from the psychic, had dis- 
tributed the sand in long, irregular furrows. I then 
requested six taps at a single point, which I desig- 
nated w^ith my finger. These were given hi a cas- 
cade, visibly disturbing the sand. I regard this ex- 
periment as conclusive evidence that the rappings 
are purely molecular phenomena. 

Class III. — The lifting of bodies of more or less 
weight also pertains to nearly every medium of the 
nervo-dynamic type, whose operations I have wit- 
nessed. Mr. Home excels in this class of manif es- 



MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 139 

tations. On one occasion, at a seance given by him 
at Stafford, Connecticut, early in his career, I saw 
him lift a table upon which two persons were seated, 
without visible contact. I was standing near him 
at the moment, so as to be between him and the 
body to be lifted. A peculiar rushing current, as of 
the wind, appreciably preceded the levitation. In 
an experiment on this phenomenon, conducted in 
my own room, a large back parlor, in New York 
City, with one of the habitues of Metropolitan Hall, 
in Sixth Avenue, I was able, by a very simple test, to 
refer this current to the person of the medium. 
Placing myself between him and the large centre- 
table in the middle of the room, then holding a large 
sheet of paper of very dense fibre before him, and 
between him and the article to be lifted, so as to in- 
tercept the current, if any, and awaiting the result, 
the sheet was visibly swayed in the direction of the 
table, and with considerable force. It should be 
added that the medium was seated between the table 
and the unbroken inner wall of the room, and that 
the windows and doors were shut. The marble top 
of the table only was lifted. By projecting this cur- 
rent downward, I have no doubt that a powerful me- 
dium might lift himself from the ground, but have 
never witnessed the attempt, though Mr. Home is 
credited with having accomplished it. 

Repeating this experiment with the same me- 
dium, I discarded the paper test, and addressed my at- 
tention to the question whether the liberation of this 



140 MEMORANDA OF NERYO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

current was attended with any physical symptoms. 
It was between three and four o'clock in the after- 
noon, and the room light enough for careful obser- 
vation. Talking carelessly, but with my eyes fixed 
on him at a distance of about four feet, my scrutiny 
was rewarded by the observation of a sudden pallor 
suffusing his face, and a perceptible tendency to ri- 
gidity of the muscles, indicative of a nervous shock. 
I did not observe his eyes particularly. To this 
class of phenomena belong the waving of curtains, 
the swinging of pendulums at a distance, and the 
sounding of notes on a distant piano. 

Class IV. — The phenomenon of floating lumi- 
nous bodies is of later origin than the mere tours de 
force grouped together under the three preceding 
classes, though the correlation of nerve-atmosphere 
as a floating or hovering motion was witnessed by 
me at a private seance given in Bond Street, one 
evening in the summer of 1865, and at subsequent 
seances given by the same medium. In this instance 
an instrument known as the harmonicon hovered 
about the room, emitting musical sounds at first, 
then falling into a kind of accentuated rhythm of ' 
notes, which, however, did not resemble any tune 
with which I am familiar. In the summer of 1867, 
at a parlor seance given by a wealthy spiritualist, 
then resident in Thirtieth Street, a luminous nebula 
hovered over the piano for a moment ; a cascade of 
notes trickled from the keys, as if an invisible hand 
had swept them, and then the instrument fell into 



MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 141 

Mendelssohn's " Midsummer-Mght's Dream " over- 
ture. There was no one within six feet of the 
piano, nor did the closest examination reveal any 
visible cause for the music. While the nebula was 
hovering over the instrument, the medium was 
sitting by the table, say eight feet distant, silent and 
motionless. The nebula, on the other hand, was 
pervaded with a kind of swinging and swaying mo- 
tion, and, as the music ceased, it wasted away in its 
place. Interposing between the table and the instru- 
ment with a sheet of paper, the test was swayed 
toward the phantom, as by the wind. The phe- 
nomenon lasted possibly four minutes. It was an 
afternoon seance, the parlor was well lighted, and 
there were no facilities at hand for producing an 
optical illusion at the point occupied by the appa- 
rition. 

In the course of the conversation that followed 
the seance, the medium stated to me that he was not 
a musician, and could not possibly have executed the 
overture; but, on inquiry, I ascertained that four 
persons present were acquainted with the piece. It 
was a little mysterious to me at that date, I confess ; 
but, in the light of later investigation, it would not 
at all stagger me, if, after a similar seance, I should 
ascertain that neither the medium nor any other 
person present was acquainted with a piece drawn 
from the piano apparently by a luminous nebula ; 
for, knowing from observation the superhuman 
recollection of previous impressions appertaining to 



142 MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

these states of the nervous system, I should only 
conclude that the medium had heard it at some re- 
mote date, and that it had sprung up spontaneously 
under unnatural nervous excitation. The note- 
books of medical men who make nervous affections 
a specialty, are full of analogous instances in which 
faculty apparently preternatural has been developed 
in these nervous states. I have in my possession a 
piece of music arranged for the flute by a somnam- 
bulist who was no musician when he was conscious. 
Prof. Crookes says that, under the strictest test con- 
ditions, he has more than once had a solid, self- 
luminous, crystalline body placed in his hand by a 
hand which did not belong to any person in the 
room. He has also observed luminous points of 
light darting about and settling on the heads of dif- 
ferent persons in the room ; has had questions an- 
swered by flashes in his face; has seen sparks of 
light ascending from the table to the ceiling, and 
has been present when a solid, self-luminous body 
floated silently about the room, descended and thrice 
struck the table, and then faded away. "While this 
was going on, the medium was lying back apparently 
insensible. 

Class Y. — The apparition of luminous hands 
writing messages with a pencil has been witnessed 
by so many observers, and under the strictest con- 
ditions of test, that it is not necessary more than to 
describe them. The observations of Dr. Holland, 
my own, and those of Prof. Crookes, however varied 



MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 143 

in the details, agree in one point, that a luminous 
nebula generally precedes the formation of the phan- 
tom. Prof. Crookes has observed this nebula grad- 
ually condense into the form of a hand, and carry 
small objects about. He has seen a nebula hover 
over a heliotrope, snap off a sprig, and present it to 
a lady. Robert Dale Owen relies implicitly on this 
class of phenomena as illustrative of spiritual pres- 
ences. Prof. Crookes, who has had better oppor- 
tunity of observing this class than I have, having 
had Mr. Home at his command for some years, gives 
more instances of phantom-apparition, and more sat- 
isfactory instances, than I have been able to find. 
He states that, on one occasion, a small hand ap- 
peared thrice at the dining-table, and handed him a 
flower ; at another, a small hand and arm appeared 
playing about a lady, then patted him on the arm, 
and plucked at his sleeve ; at another, a finger and 
thumb picked at the petals of a flower in Mr. Home's 
button-hole, and distributed them to persons sitting 
near him. At another, he saw a visible hand fin- 
gering the keys of an accordeon ; at another, he saw 
an object move first, then a luminous nebula envel- 
oped it, and gradually condensed into a hand. Fre- 
quently, these appearances look solid and life-like, 
the fingers moving, and the external surface of nat- 
ural color, while at the wrist the hand shades off 
into luminous haze. They are often warm, but 
more generally cool. He has held one of these hands 
in his own until it gradually resolved into vapor and 



144 MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

faded from his grasp. Miss Fox as medium, lie has 
seen a luminous hand come down from above, hover 
near him for a few seconds, take a pencil from his 
hand, and rapidly write on a sheet of paper, then 
drop the pencil, ascend ceiling-ward, and waste into 
darkness. This was done under strict conditions of 
test. 

Having rooms for some months in the spring of 
1867, after my return from the country, at the house 
of a gentleman and his wife in Thirtieth Street, who 
were both enthusiastic spiritualists, and mediums of 
considerable faculty, I had more or less daily con- 
tact with advocates of the special tenets of spiritual- 
ism. Both my landlord and landlady, by-the-way, 
suffered from periodical nervous attacks. During 
this period, in addition to seances in my professional 
capacity, I was able to observe very minutely, in a 
couple of its exemplary representatives, the peculiar 
mental aura habitual to the class, and have learned 
to give but little weight to their testimony, without 
doubting their sincerity, but as colored and deter- 
mined by nervous disorder. Scientific observation 
calls for a mind loyal to facts and indifferent to pre- 
judices, acutely perceptive and skeptical, and — be- 
yond all — unbiased by those morbid predispositions 
that spring from nervous perversion, either heredi- 
tary or acquired. I have, hence, with the single ex- 
ception of Prof. Crookes, rejected the literature of 
spiritualism, in so far as it bears upon these phe- 
nomena, save when supported by my own observa- 



MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 145 

tion, or by the word of accredited scientific witness- 
es — medical preferred. 

At private seances (aside from special experi- 
ments) I have twice witnessed the phenomenon of a 
phantom-hand writing messages with a pencil. They 
were preceded by luminous vapor in both instances ; 
and the seances occurred in the evening, though un- 
der conditions that rendered trickery impracticable. 

In the first instance, after sitting a few minutes, 
the medium asked whether any one present had a 
pencil. I took a lead-pencil from my vest-pocket, 
and held it in my hand. No person present was 
within four feet of the centre-table, upon which lay 
several loose sheets of letter-paper. Presently, a 
luminous vapor, accompanied with perceptible mo- 
tion, as of a gelid wind brushing past my hand, ap- 
peared hovering over the pencil. It did not seem 
to come from anywhere in the room, but to form 
gradually in its place from invisible materials. I 
did not once remove my eyes from it, though my 
nerves were just a little shaken. The nebulous 
stage had not lasted in excess of ten seconds, when 
the light commenced to die out at the base, and a 
filmy, semi-transparent hand and arm gradually grew 
out of it, like a transformation of the nebula itself. 
It did not seem to me that any particular part of the 
hand and arm was formed first, though near the 
elbow the arm became fainter and fainter, and was 
finally merged into luminosity. Taking the pencil 
from my hand, the apparition floated toward the ta- 
7 



146 MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

ble, and wrote on one of the loose sheets, " I have 
done this, that all present may know I am a spirit." 
The pencil dropped, the hand melted into vapor, the 
vapor into the invisible. That there was no writing 
on either of the several sheets on the table before 
the seance commenced, I know from personal exam- 
ination. 

At a seance given by the same medium two even- 
ings later, the phenomenon was repeated ; and on 
this occasion I gave more attention to the operator, 
and less to the feat. The point was, to observe 
whether any symptoms of nervous disturbance pre- 
ceded the formation of the nebula, or were contem- 
poraneously developed. Two seconds, I should say, 
before the luminous cloud appeared hovering over 
the table, upon which lay a pencil and some blank 
sheets of foolscap, four in number, a barely percep- 
tible shudder ran through the person of the medium, 
who, from that instant, seemed to sink rapidly into 
a state resembling mild cataleptic trance, and lay in 
that state while the hand was writing the message : 
" Ye walk daily on the border of the spirit-land, yet 
ye deny spirits ; I am the same that spoke to you on 
Monday evening." The pencil dropped, the hand 
wasted away, the medium slowly recovered from 
slumber. This medium was kind enough afterward 
to give me an afternoon at my rooms, by way of 
verifying the facts, and preventing trickery. 

Class VI. — This class forms a natural appendix 
to the preceding, and is of still later production. 



MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 147 

Prof. Crookes gives two instances, Mr. Home as 
medium in both, cases, in which he has witnessed 
full-length phantoms under satisfactory test condi- 
tions. 

It was just at twilight, in his own parlor, and 
the medium was sitting about eight feet from the 
windows, when the curtain was observed to move, 
and the semi-transparent form of a man was. wit- 
nessed by all present. The phantom was standing 
by the window, and appeared to move the curtain 
with its hand. 

In the second instance a phantom-form came 
from the corner of the room, took an accordion 
in its hand, and floated about the room for many 
minutes, playing the instrument. It w r as visible to 
all present. A slight cry from a lady caused it to 
vanish. 

I have not witnessed this full-length phenome- 
non personally under conditions of test so accurate 
as to preclude possible deception. 

At the seances of Mrs. Holmes, of Philadelphia, 
which I twice attended, a board partition across the 
corner of the rooms formed a triangular cabinet of 
shallow dimensions, from which examination dis- 
closed no means of exit, except the door. The door 
of this cabinet opened, and a luminous nebula ap- 
peared and gradually assumed the shape of a woman 
dressed in the Greek fashion, wearing a lace scarf on 
her head, her arms bare and sleeves flowing — a very 
dramatic spectre indeed. The apparition floated 



148 MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

into the room, gossiped with one, accepted a bouquet 
from another, returned to the cabinet, and gradually 
wasted into nebula, then into nothing. The spirit 
announced herself as Miss Katie King, daughter of 
John King, a pirate in the days of Robert Kidd. I 
did not trouble myself to apply tests in this instance, 
as the seances seemed to partake of the Pirnetti type 
too obviously to command investigation from the 
stand-point of this inquiry. Mrs. Holmes, let me 
add, is a person of considerable physical force. 

The reader will notice at a glance that the lumi- 
nous nebula is a condition precedent in the produc- 
tion of the phantom ; and, if accustomed to scientific 
experiment, he will suspect that this luminosity is 
consequent upon molecular agitation at the point 
whence the light proceeds. That the nerve-ether 
proceeding from the person of a medium should 
be susceptible of condensation into a nebula, then 
into a phantom, is no more wonderful, though more 
striking, than that, as in the various nervo-psychic 
cases, it should be susceptible of sensory impres- 
sion. Again, the peculiar nature of the luminosity 
developed by the nebula corresponds in all partic- 
ulars with that of the light sometimes developed 
about the heads of epileptics at different stages 
of the disorder. I have not been able to attempt 
spectrum analysis in either case, nor are the condi- 
tions such as to render it practicable ; but I have no 
doubt that analysis, were it possible, would show 
that they are identical ; and no person, w T ho has wit- 



MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 149 

nessed both, could have any reasonable doubt on the 
subject. It may be possible, by-and-by, to demon- 
strate this point by instrumental tests of absolute 
accuracy; but so evanescent are the conditions, so 
feeble often is the luminosity developed by nerve- 
ether, that the world will have to wait long for an 
unerring demonstration of what is undoubted. I 
have had many opportunities of comparing the two, 
and I cannot be mistaken as to a luminosity so 
peculiar in its quality and behavior as that of nerve- 
atmosphere under excitation. Could this point be 
demonstrated by absolute instrumental tests, the 
whole question — whether these phantoms are or are 
not transformations of nervous ether — would be set- 
tled beyond the need of physiological induction. 

At a seance given me one afternoon at my 
rooms, by the same medium whose private seances I 
attended, removing the arm of a horseshoe magnet, I 
brought the open poles in contact with the nebula, 
with a view of testing whether it could be dissipated 
in that way. The test was not successful from that 
aspect of the subject ; but it was quite successful 
from another point of view that seems to me equally 
conclusive. The poles of the magnet being ad- 
vanced toward the border of the nebula, the me- 
dium, who was sitting about six feet from it, appar- 
ently half asleep, was attacked with perceptible con- 
vulsions of tetanic cast. On closing the armature, 
the convulsions ceased. Though not dissipated by 
magnetism, the nebula also was perceptibly agitated 



150 MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

to and fro, and developed augmented light. I now 
tested the matter further, by removing the arm of 
the magnet at other points in the room contiguous 
to the medium, but no perceptible effect on his 
nerves was developed. I regard this test as conclu- 
sive evidence that the nebula was in this case a trans- 
formation of the nervous atmosphere of the medium, 
and that the magnetism that produced the slight 
spasms was transmitted to the medium's nerves 
through contact with this nervous nebula, suspended 
in the atmosphere fully six feet from his person. 
At a subsequent experiment with the same medium, 
the same phenomena were repeated upon removing 
the arm of the magnet in contiguity to the cloud. 
The magnet was one capable, possibly, of lifting 
twenty pounds. 

This test is not, perhaps, so unerring as a test 
more instrumental in its nature would be, but it 
seems to me conclusively to establish the nervous 
constitution of the nebula. 

Two seances were afterward given me at my 
rooms in West Twenty-fourth Street, New York, by 
another medium of considerable pretensions, at both 
of which messages were written by phantom-hands 
on sheets of foolscap lying on the large centre-table, 
the medium sitting about six feet from the table, 
on the sofa. In both instances the luminous mist 
preceded the hand by some seconds. One of these 
messages I find in my note-book as a transcendental 
aphorism worthy of Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. It 



MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 151 

reads, " Matter and soul are the two poles of one and 
the same infinite reality." The other is a singular 
definition of trance, and runs, " By trances the soul 
partakes of the life infinite." I will note as a cu- 
rious fact that both these messages, though I had 
never had any conversation with the medium on 
the subject, were but verbal deliveries of two ideas 
which had been running in my mind for some 
months, and which had already been elaborated in 
literary form. One of them was afterward printed 
in the Radical for April, 1871, published in Boston, 
as a criticism on the speculative tendencies of Her- 
bert Spencer, Huxley, Bain, and other leading expo- 
nents of scientific thought in England. Nor have I 
any doubt that the origin of the messages in both 
instances was due to my own studies in that special 
direction. 

Tested, in the first instance, with a magnet brought 
in contiguity to the half-vapory hand, while in the 
act of writing, the medium, half reclining on the 
sofa, suddenly started up rigidly, and sank back upon 
the withdrawal of the current, which, however, did 
not extinguish the apparition, although the pencil 
staggered perceptibly. Tested similarly in the sec- 
ond instance, the effect was less marked, both on the 
medium and on the spectre ; and I was again un- 
successful in my attempt to extinguish the phantom 
with a magnet, though the pencil wavered slightly 
with the current, and resumed its regularity upon 
withdrawal, and a slight but visible tremor was its 



152 MEMORANDA OF NERYO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

exponent in the nervous system of the operator, who 
subsequently confessed that he experienced some- 
thing like a shock on the application of the poles to 
the edge of the half -condensed nebula, just above the 
wrist, but attributed it to the rapport between him- 
self and the spirit. The magnet was the same as 
that employed in the former experiments. 

Thus, though any actual comparison of analyses 
of these phenomena — the light developed in epilepsy 
and that developed in the luminous nebulae at spirit- 
ual seances — is impracticable, no reasonable doubt 
can exist as to the nervous origin of the phantoms 
quoted by spiritualists as demonstrative of actual 
spiritual agency in human affairs. 

The main difficulty that will occur to the general 
observer in this relation will be this : " Can it be 
that, without other conducting medium than the 
atmosphere, a force can be directed to a particular 
point and express itself in a particular form ? " This 
difficulty is obviated by the nature of nerve-atmos- 
phere, considered as an agent acting externally to 
the medium. There is no known manner in which 
electricity can be acted upon and controlled by voli- 
tion ; but in nervous atmosphere the physiologist is 
dealing with an agent the very nature of which is 
related to volition, and correlated with it. It is ne- 
cessary, therefore, in the consideration of this ques- 
tion, to dismiss all conventional ideas on the subject 
of force, and to appreciate the fact that in these phe- 
nomena the investigator is engaged with a force that 



MEMORANDA OF NERYO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 153 

is, to some extent at least, self -directive and self- 
directing, but one not at all presuming psychic or 
spiritual agency external to tlie medium ; a force 
that is not to be regarded as separate from other 
forces illustrated in the phenomena of Nature, but 
nevertheless self-determinative and susceptible of 
correlation into volition. 

That these transformations of nervous atmos- 
phere are abnormal, no physiologist doubts ; but 
the inductions of physiology rob them of their su- 
pernatural attitude, and they present themselves to 
the mind of the inquirer in the aspect of strange 
phenomena, indicative, not of peculiar spiritual gifts, 
but of the possession of hereditary or acquired ner- 
vous perversion ; not of possession by devils, or by 
spirits good or evil, as was anciently supposed, but 
of an inheritance of suffering and of morbidness. 
Let me now interpose a paragraph, and recur to this 
aspect of the subject further on. 

C. H. Foster, native of Salem, Massachusetts, about 
forty years of age, of heavy and somewhat sensual 
face and physique, became clairvoyant at ten years of 
age. He was at first only a local celebrity, but finally 
traveled through the principal States of the Union. 
He was during his sojourn in England the guest of 
Bulwer, and furnished the original of Margrave in 
the " Strange Story." One of his feats, in which 
he differs from all mediums I have met in the prog- 
ress of this investigation, consists in causing the 
initials of the spirit, supposed to be present, to ap- 



154: MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

pear in red letters on his hand or arm. His capacity 
for the performance of physical feats is perceptibly 
affected by atmospheric conditions. Inquiry at Sa- 
lem develops the fact that he undoubtedly inherited 
nervous disturbance from his paternal ancestor. 

Yiewed in their medical aspect, the foregoing 
phenomena present themselves as examples of hy- 
percinesia, the nervo - psychic series previously in- 
stanced presenting so many examples of hyperes- 
thesia, as the term is employed by medical psy- 
chologists. The one is associated with lesion of the 
motor, the other with lesion of the sensory centres. 
The record abounds with instances in which trans- 
formations of tissue have occurred as the sequels of 
intense nervous impression. A young lady in Ge- 
neva, Switzerland, whose mistress had died under 
operation for cancer, and who was similarly af- 
flicted, was so overcome with terror on learning the 
death of her employer, that she fell down in a swoon 
and did not recover for some hours. When, at last, 
she came to herself again, the tumor had totally dis- 
appeared. A woman in Valois, afflicted with an 
enormous goitre, was informed by the surgeon that 
she would have to submit to an operation for its re- 
moval on the following day ; but, when twenty-four 
hours afterward he presented himself, prepared for 
the operation, the goitre no longer existed. These, 
and other instances analogous to the phenomena in 
Mr. Foster's case, though generally classed as the 
products of intense action of the imagination, are 



MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 155 

properly examples of the transforming activity of 
intense nervous impression. Instances of this spe- 
cial type need not be multiplied, for there is no dis- 
pute among scientific men as to the authenticity of 
the facts, although their explanation is to be sought 
in the molecular influence as exercised upon living 
tissue by nervous impression, rather than in any 
direct action of the imagination. The principal 
phenomena in Foster's case fall so obviously under 
this category as to preclude the necessity of other 
explanation than a mere request to the reader to 
collect, collate, and consider the many facts of this 
class, that medical men have observed and recorded. 
I cannot, however, although not strictly relevant to 
the discussion, resist the temptation to remind Mr. 
Cox and Prof. Crookes that the psychic-force theory 
is a plagiarism. When the interest in mesmerism 
was at its highest in America, between the years 
1815 and 1850, a Hindoo priest named Lehanteka, 
then resident in California, disseminated a theory 
that anticipates the view taken by these gentlemen, 
by some years. According to Lehanteka, the per- 
ceptive and dynamic energy of man is separable 
into three concentric spheres ; the first consisting of 
the sensory and motor organism ; the second, of 
physical agents having the quality of conducting 
sensory and motor influences ; the third, of a psy- 
chic and subsensible medium, susceptible of being 
acted upon by the volition of the mesmerist. One 
thing is known, as to the genesis of mesmeric clair- 



156 MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

voyance, namely — that the operator acts upon his 
subject by means of vibrating waves of nervous at- 
mosphere. This is experimentally demonstrated. 
It is also experimentally demonstrated that molecu- 
lar vibrations of a given wave-length, whether act- 
ing upon the optic, olfactory, gustatory, auditory, 
or peripheral nerves, have a tendency to produce 
insensibility, and to eventuate in that morbid ner- 
vous state whence spring trance and clairvoyance. 
In self-induced clairvoyance, however, the medium 
frequently depends upon the physiological action of 
lifting the eyes at an angle, and retaining them in 
that position. This fact suggests a curious prob- 
lem, and one I will not attempt to settle. In in- 
stances of trance, or insensibility, supervening after 
epileptic convulsions, and in most morbid nervous 
states, this position of the eyes (rolled up under the 
upper lid) is an ever-present symptom ; so that the 
question presents itself, whether the physiological 
action of rolling the eyes and retaining them fixedly 
in that position is due to a deeper law of association 
than has yet been observed and stated by psycholo- 
gists, or whether it is due to the direct effect of un- 
natural tension on the optic nerves and ganglia. Let 
it be noted, however, that the facts of mesmerism, 
so far as investigated, tend to this hypothesis : That 
all these morbid states of consciousness are the ex- 
ponents of molecular transformations going on in 
the nervous system * and it will not be disputed, per- 
haps, that the normal function of any given tract 



MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 157 

of tissue, nervous or muscular, is only another name 
for normal molecular activity in that tract. This 
is the nearest proximate definition of function that 
physiologists can offer. Now, how is mesmeric slum- 
ber usually produced ? By transverse passes from the 
coronal region of the brain in a generally sloping 
and downward direction. In other words, the ma- 
nipulation tends to produce morbid function of the 
cortex of the brain, by means of transverse waves 
of molecular vibration. In this morbid condition, 
as previously indicated in the course of this inquiry, 
the nervous system accepts and correlates as intelli- 
gence the varied operations of the molecular force 
instrumental in environing natural phenomena. I 
have notes of one instance in which a clairvoyant 
predicted the fall of a manufactory, the floors of 
which rested upon iron columns, which, as is well 
known, are subject to transformations of molecular 
constitution through the vibratory action of con- 
tinuous jar, and stated the operating cause of the 
catastrophe to be the effect of jar upon the iron col- 
umns ; and the prediction was verified to the day 
and hour. I must, however, before entering spe- 
cially upon the discussion of the intelligence associ- 
ated with hypercinesia, put the reader in possession 
of a few memoranda, furnishing inductive proof 
that, in all its various aspects, this phenomenon is 
constant in its association with the epileptic aura — 
that is to say, with hereditary neurosis. In one 
cas 3 — the family well known in social circles — the 



158 MEMORANDA OF NERVO-DYNAMIC PHENOMENA. 

daughter was subject to attacks of clairvoyance, and, 
being of cerebro-vital temperament, presented, to a 
nearly equal extent, both classes of phenomena, the 
nervo-psyehic and the nervo-dynamic ; while the 
son was subject to epileptic fits of pronounced type. 
Of three brothers, two were noted in the phenomena 
of table-tipping and rappings, while the third and 
youngest was th& victim of periodical epileptic 
mania. Indeed, without wasting words in particu- 
larities, I will here affirm, once for all, that in no 
case, so far as I have examined, where one member 
of a family is a spiritual medium, and presents, in 
pronounced form, the nervous phenomena associ- 
ated with spiritualism, will the careful observer find 
it difficult to detect and verify the existence of the 
epileptic predisposition in other members. The 
reader will understand that the preceding remarks 
refer only to actual nervous phenomena, and not to 
the optical spectres and illusions (often introduced 
at seances) dependent upon the refraction, reflection, 
and absorption of light — striking and interesting, as 
experiments in physics, but readily solved by appli- 
cation of known laws of optics. 



vn. 

PHYSIOLOGY OF THE VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE IN- 
YOLYED IN THE FOREGOING SERIES. 

Submitting the facts of the preceding series to 
careful analysis — and they are classified in the gen- 
eral order of their historical succession, from the first 
crude rappings of the Fox sisters to the full-length 
phantoms of Mr. Home — the reader will observe 
that in the first three classes . nerve-atmosphere or 
nervous force is correlated with motor force in its. 
simpler aspects, while in the last three it is corre- 
lated with light and with complex molecular phe- 
nomena of a spectral cast. He will observe also 
that the phenomena of all classes are continually 
associated with an intelligence. 

The experiments described in the course of the 
preceding classification and description leave no 
room for doubt as to the immediate nervous con- 
nection that exists between the medium and his 
phantom, or as to the energy engaged in its pro- 
duction proceeding directly from the medium's 
person. Nor is there any doubt as to the strictly 
nervous origin of this energy. 



160 PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 

The phenomenon known among spiritualists as 
spirit materializing itself — taking no note of the 
paradox involved in the phrase — results, therefore, 
and demonstrably, from the nervous atmosphere of 
the medium (that is to say, from waves of nervous 
ether emanating from his person and controlled 
by his volition), entering into intimate molecular 
relation and contact with surrounding bodies, gase- 
ous as well as solid ; and, could these so-called psy- 
chics be persuaded to submit the phenomena to a 
scientific investigation extensive and protracted 
enough for the purpose, there is no doubt that the 
field would afford new and valuable contributions 
to psychology. Under ordinary conditions of the 
nervous system, this phenomenon cannot occur, be- 
cause the function of nervous force terminates in 
muscular coordination, and in the expression of in- 
telligence ; but, when reflex excitability, with its 
consequent emission of nervous energy, exists as a 
condition precedent, the human organism, as physi- 
cians well know, seems to be gifted with super- 
human faculties. I have not met Mr. Home since 
I was a boy — he visited Stafford, Connecticut, in 
those days as an itinerant medium, and lived with an 
acquaintance of mine for some weeks — but I have 
ample testimony that at that date he was subject 
to nervous attacks of considerable intensity, from 
Mr. Amos Harvey, since deceased, an ardent spirit- 
ualist, at whose house his seances were given, and 
from inquiry at Lebanon, Connecticut, where his 



PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 161 

boyhood was passed ; and in Ms personal appearance, 
as I remember him, he presented all the symptoms 
I have since learned to associate with the epileptic 
aura. * 

It must not be understood, however, from the 
general drift of the facts described in these pages, 
that every medium is subject to epileptic paroxysms, 
though many a celebrated medium has been at some 
period of his life, but that the nervous phenomena 
exhibited at seances replace, and are in the nature of 
paroxysms ; being, if the phrase may be permitted, 
larvated forms of the malady, induced within certain 
limits at will, but only after a more or less prolonged 
period of incubation. The case of Dr. Newton, a 
well-known healing medium, whose exhibitions I 
have attended on several occasions, presents an ex- 
ample of this principle. Although of powerful 
physique^ and of strongly-marked vital tempera- 
ment, during his intervals of rest the faculty is 
quite passive, not from muscular exhaustion, but 
from the fact that reflex excitability cannot be set 
up at will until a period of incubation has been 
passed. 

It has been stated that nervous force may be 
correlated into motor force and into light. It should 
be. added that it may be correlated into electricity 
and converted into the shock, as occurs in the in- 
stance of electric fishes, in which no physiologist 
doubts that the shock is contingent on the volition 
of the animal, and produced through the agency of 



162 PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 

the nervous system. Indeed, Dr. Philips, of Paris, 
in his notes on this subject, entitled " La Theorie de 
la Sensation Extra-Nerveuse," makes this correla- 
tion the basis of what is known to ancient supersti- 
tion as the faculty of second sight, and maintains that, 
under certain very sensitive conditions of the optic 
nerve, the waves of terrestrial electricity, perme- 
ating all bodies, traversing all spaces, may affect the 
retina of the eye ; a view of the subject quite in 
harmony with the experimental facts that a strong 
current produces the sensation of a dull, red light, 
and that the human body may be lighted by electri- 
city so as to reveal its organic structure. 

With this point let me dismiss this aspect of the 
subject. There is electricity enough in a single drop 
of water, says Faraday, to produce a flash of light- 
ning, could its equilibrium but be disturbed ; and 
there is the nerve-force in a single centre of the 
brain to lift a hundred tons, or produce a thousand 
phantoms at once, could it suddenly be correlated 
as motor energy under the direction of the will. 

As to the intelligence apparently governing 
these phenomena, the reader, who has carefully ex- 
amined the series of cases designated as nervo-psy- 
chic, will be troubled with no doubts as to its origin 
in the peripheral aura that envelops the medium. 

Take, for example, the principal instance depend- 
ed upon by Prof. Crookes, as establishing the agency 
of an intelligence disconnected from the brain of 
the medium. During a seance with Mr. Home, a 



PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 163 

small lath moved across the table to him, and de- 
livered a message by tapping his hand, he repeating 
the alphabet, and the lath tapping at the right let- 
ters. The other end of the lath rested on the table. 
He now propounded the question, " Can the intelli- 
gence governing the motion of this lath alter the 
movements, and give me a telegraphic message 
through the Morse alphabet, by taps on the hand ? " 
— as he had every reason to believe that the Morse 
code was quite unknown to any other person pres- 
ent, and it was only imperfectly known to him. No 
sooner had he said this, than the alphabetic system 
was abandoned, and the message was continued in 
the manner requested. The professor accepts this 
test as conclusive. 

Had Prof. Crookes examined the psychology of 
the subject as carefully as he has the phenomena, he 
would scarcely have quoted this instance as support- 
ing his view, since it is established by abundant facts 
and experiments — see cases VII., VIII., and IX., 
and the experiments of Dr. Wood — that, in the 
clairvoyant state, the medium becomes en rapport 
with the nervous systems of all persons within the 
circle of his peripheral atmosphere, whether imme- 
diately present or not. He may even (as in the case 
of Zschokke) know vividly that which lies dormant 
in their memories, and which they could not recall 
distinctly by any effort of the will, but which is, 
nevertheless, distinctly registered in the brain ; and 
as showing how every nervous impression of our 



164 PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 

lives is actually registered and becomes a part of tlie 
brain, bow often is it tbat a man tries to recollect, 
but cannot, something be is perfectly conscious of 
knowing. He is perfectly conscious, too, what it is 
that be wants to remember; puts bis band to bis 
forehead as if to shut out external impressions while 
be bunts for it ; and, when at last he finds it, he 
identifies it at once as the very thing he was looking 
for. 

Again, the brain, as an organic register of ner- 
vous impressions, is crowded with memoranda of 
things that have escaped consciousness altogether. 
Persons subject to attacks of cerebral epilepsy tell 
me that, in the nervous excitability that precedes the 
fit, they often remember things that are to them as 
if they had happened in another life. 

Mr. Crandall, an acute observer in these matters, 
states that he once called upon a clairvoyant in the 
western part of the State of New York, who, among 
other things, described his horse, one that he had 
recently bought^ the stable where he kept it, even to 
the lock on the door, the blanket he had strapped 
over it that very morning, and — what is strangest 
of all — a certain minute white spot, of the existence 
of which he did not know. He contradicted her as 
to this fact ; but, on repairing to the stable, careful 
inspection convinced him that the woman was right. 
The bearing of this incident is obvious. Though 
the impression made on the retina of the eye, and 
thence transmitted to the brain, had been so minute 



PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 165 

as to elude consciousness, it was, nevertheless, un- 
consciously registered in his nervous organism, with 
which the woman was en rapport. 

To put the conclusion in a word, our nervous 
systems daily register thousands of impressions that 
are never correlated as consciousness at all, and manv 
more that are only correlated as flitting and fantastic 
fancies. Never correlated, did I say ? I should say 
never correlated, except in those strange moods when 
a man is clairvoyant, not only as to the world, but as 
to that which lies within himself. 

The application of these facts to the case in- 
stanced by' Prof. Crookes is obvious ; so obvious 
that I hesitate to trouble the reader by stating it 
formally. As en rapport with his nervous system, 
in which, though imperfectly correlated as memory, 
was registered the impression of the Morse code, 
Mr. Home received, through the impression of his 
nervous atmosphere, and correlated in his own brain, 
with the minuteness and rapidity incident to reflex 
excitability, the details of that register. Strictly 
speaking, it is unscientific, because in excess of the 
necessary induction of the facts, to assume that in 
these states mind is en rapport with mind, soul with 
soul. On the other hand, it is nervous system that 
is en rapport with nervous system. The nervous 
register of a given thought in your mind is trans- 
ferred to my brain as an impression of the nerve- 
atmosphere surrounding me, and there correlated as 
thought. 



166 PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 

I would not be understood, however, as assuming 
that the majority oi; mediums are guilty of inten- 
tional deception, or that they have penetrated the 
scientific aspects of the subject deeply enough to 
have gathered the facts necessary to form a correct 
conclusion. With few exceptions, they are ignorant 
and unlettered men, who find themselves in posses- 
sion of a strange faculty of trance — something that 
has been associated for ages with revelation and with 
the supernatural * — something that really is preter- 
natural in some of its aspects. They dream dreams, 
and the dreams are fulfilled ; in strange moods they 
have premonitions, and they come to pass. "With 
the vast discoveries of medical psychology they are 
wholly unacquainted, and it never occurs to them, 
until too late, that these trances and dreams and 
premonitions and nervous shocks, as if some spirit 
were taking possession of them, are the exponents 
of nervous disorder. This, in a few words, is the 
history of nearly every medium I have met in the 
progress of this investigation; and in the mental 
history of most spiritualists, who are not mediums, 
I find the same sad struggle with a predisposition, 

1 There are ample reasons for concluding that the demoniac pos- 
session of the ancients was, in the main, associated with the various 
types of epileptic insanity. A better and more graphic description 
of an attack of grand mat could scarcely have been given by a mod- 
ern physician than that of the young man possessed of a dumb spirit 
(Mark ix. 17, 18.) The descriptions of Luke are even more ex- 
plicit. The Greeks seem to have been the only ancient race who 
regarded insanity as a physical disorder. 



PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 167 

whence arising they know not. Acquit them, then, 
with a few exceptions, of intentional deceit, and 
give them pity for blame. 

An instance of the singular manner in which 
nervous impressions are sometimes correlated into 
consciousness, that occurred to me in the summer of 
1863, is in point here. Having taken a severe cold, 
I called on my doctor, who prepared me some pow- 
ders, without explaining their constitution, and 
ordered me to take one at night before going to bed. 
I did as directed, and slowly recovered, the process 
occupying a week or more. I had never knowingly 
taken any opium, and was unacquainted experien- 
tially with its physiological effect ; but, as the illness 
w^ore off, I commenced to have an unconquerable 
longing for something that expressed itself in my 
mind as morphia, though I had never, so far as I 
knew, taken any. So importunate was the passion, 
that I procured some morphia in doses of a quarter 
of a grain. After taking a dose the longing was 
stilled, and did not recur until the following evening, 
w^hen I sopped it to sleep with another quarter. 
This was continued for a couple of weeks, until 
the habit was somewhat settled, when, one night, 
as I was about to swallow my usual dose, I mas- 
tered myself with a strong effort, threw my pow- 
ders into the wash-basin, and vowed not to renew 
them. The struggle that followed was a des- 
perate one, but I took no more morphia. Now, 
how should it happen that, after taking morphia, in 



168 PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 

conjunction with other agents for a few nights, un- 
knowing what I did, the lassitude occasioned by its 
withdrawal should express itself in an intelligent 
longing for that deadly drug, except by way of that 
organic but generally unconscious intelligence that 
appertains to nervous organization ? 

Again, in the production of nervo-dynamic phe- 
nomena, the medium, in the semi-, or proximately 
complete, unconsciousness of the state, is not aware 
of exercising his volition ; so true it is that in many 
of these abnormal nervous paroxysms a man seems 
to be a double man, even to himself. But here the 
stereotyped view of volition is at fault. As an en- 
ergy pertaining to the motor tracts of the nervous 
system, volition is an element of nervous organiza- 
tion, and may, as is observed in somnambulism, act 
without the consciousness of acting. 

And here I must dissent from the view of Dr. 
Carpenter, master of physiology in its relation to 
psychic states though he is ; for my own observa- 
tions, prosecuted for the last ten years in this special 
field, have convinced me that in the state known as 
unconscious cerebration it is not altogether habit 
that coordinates the muscular movements and the 
various acts done in unconsciousness. On the other 
hand, the facts point to the conclusion that, while 
ordinarily volition is set in motion by consciousness, 
it is nevertheless true that consciousness is an aspect 
of volition, not volition of consciousness, and that, 
in the state of unconsciousness, cerebration, move- 



PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 169 

ments and actions are intelligently though uncon- 
sciously coordinated. 

In a fit of somnambulism, a clergyman repairs 
to his study at night, and writes his sermon ; in an 
attack of the same, a man, unaccustomed to musical 
composition, produces a piece arranged for the flute, 
that he could no more have composed in his waking 
senses than he could have made a pair of wings grow 
from his shoulders ; stunned so as to be insensible, a 
man walks t home, undresses, and gets in bed — and 
never knows how he came there when he comes 
to himself. In either of these three acts there is 
volition, and in the former two, at least, it is directed 
by intelligence, though the intelligence is wholly un- 
conscious. It is obvious that in madness the nervous 
impressions are not correlated as consciousness — else 
the madman would remember his madness as one 
remembers a dream — but madmen often display the 
keenest intelligence and the most marvelous fecun- 
dity of invention ; not mere cunning, but invention 
that would have added to the fame of a Dickens. I 
cannot stop to discuss the varied relations that this 
question has to morbid psychology. Only the one 
point, that will and intelligence may both act with- 
out correlation as consciousness — that, consequently, 
both will and intelligence may be in operation on 
the part of the medium, without the least conscious- 
ness of it, though at seances the wonder-worker is 
usually but semi-somnolent — is of importance here. 
Nervous tissue lives only as having the quality of 



170 PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 

irritability self-determined. This is its life and the 
germ of intelligent volition. In the nervous organ- 
ism of a man this tissue is differentiated into sensory 
and motor tracts. To a single tract — the cortex of 
the brain — consciousness is limited ; but it must not 
be supposed, and need not be, that, when this func- 
tion is in temporary suspension, there is, therefore, a 
suspension of intelligent volition. In instinct, which 
in its lower forms is the simplest and most rudi- 
mentary aspect of intelligent volition that observa- 
tion supplies, this fundamental activity of the ner- 
vous tissue may be studied in its most interesting 
aspects. Our own instincts are not always, nor 
often, correlated into consciousness ; yet they present 
the phenomena of selection and discrimination as 
to means and ends, and carry with them an uncon- 
scious understanding. A good definition of instinct 
would be organic intelligence, unconscious, but none 
the less selective and discriminative. If the reader 
will take the trouble to dissect any one of the great 
ganglia of the human body he will find them differ- 
ing from the brain in no important particular, ex- 
cept that of an organization less complex. They are 
so many brains working unconsciously, but dis- 
criminatively. 

The conclusion naturally flowing from these facts, 
and from many more, the bearing of which it seems 
to me that Dr. Carpenter, in his theory of uncon- 
scious cerebration, and George Henry Lewes, in his 
theory of instinct, have overlooked, is that the life 



PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 171 

of nervous tissue is self -determining, and that when- 
ever this tissue is present the fundamental principle 
of intelligence is also present. 1 It is evident, there- 
fore, that self -directed volition is a primary property 
of nervous organization. 

The reader now sees how it is that the will of 
a spiritual medium may intelligently yet uncon- 
sciously act in the production of so-called spiritual 
phenomena ; also, how it is that nerve-atmosphere, 
invisible, imponderable, but entering into intimate 
molecular relation and contact with surrounding 
bodies and with surrounding nervous organisms, is 

1 This observation cannot be properly restricted to nervous tis- 
sue, for, wherever animal tissue is present, there is present the funda- 
mental activity that in higher organizations presents itself as con- 
scious intelligence ; and in a general way it is known that, by strict 
law of differentiation, nervous tissue was evolved from the lower 
types, and this is true without going back to the fundamental basis 
of life, that which forms the original stuff of all living tissues, proto- 
plasm. Ignoring the latter, and commencing the investigation with 
organisms of some little complexity, it is a demonstrable fact that 
conscious intelligence comes through successive differentiations of 
a mother-tissue ; for, feeling his way down the scale, the physiolo- 
gist finally loses all traces of the nervous system, then all traces of 
bony structure, then all traces of muscular structure, until he at last 
encounters mere aggregations of a jelly-like substance, scarcely dis- 
tinguishable as living, yet the mother-tissue of all living beings, 
however complex in structure, however wonderful in intelligence. 
The conclusion from the larger inductions of physiology is, therefore, 
that every ounce of tissue in the human body, of whatsoever kind 
or function, contributes its share in determining and giving direction 
to the intellectual and emotional life, and that what is generally 
termed instinct is a purely organic intelligence, unconscious, but 
competent to the special life of the organism in which it occurs, 



172 PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 

susceptible both of sensory impressions and of motor 
impulses. He sees how it is that, as in the case of 
Florence Cook, a person in trance may produce a 
visible phantom and control its movements, or may 
even visit a person, living at considerable distance, 
as an apparition, write a message, and float away or 
waste into the invisible. I have among my memo- 
randa no observed instances of this phenomenon ; 
but Robert Dale Owen, in his " Footprints on the 
Boundary of Another "World," relates an instance 
of it, in some respects analogous to the case of Cap- 
tain Densmore, the authenticity of which there is no 
occasion to doubt. How wonderful our unconscious 
operations are — far more wonderful than our con- 
scious — facts daily indicate to the observer who 
studies human life in its deeper psychological as- 
pects ; also, how superficial it is to fly to spiritual 
agencies, or to presumptions like the psychic-force 
theory, to furnish the explanation of phenomena 
purely incident to morbid nervous states. 

Although the discussion of this aspect of the 
subject should properly end with the foregoing para- 
graph, I cannot forbear noticing a single point of 
physiology that dips still deeper into the rationale of 
the nervous phenomena associated with spiritualism. 
If, as experiments thus far seem to indicate, the func- 
tional distinction between the two classes of nervous 
tissue, the white and the gray, is rudimentary, the 
former appropriated to the propagation of motor im- 
pulses and of impressions, the latter to cognition and 



PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 173 

consciousness, tlien man is a double man in his ner- 
vous structure : a being of gray nerves that thinks 
and feels and wills, and an unconscious being of white 
nerves that communicates and obeys ; and his psycho- 
logical organism can be dissected, first, from the gen- 
eral nervous organism of his unconscious life, with 
which it is coextensive, and, secondly, from the physi- 
cal organization with which it is intimately inter- 
woven. Reasoning in and in, or rather dissecting in 
and in, the physiologist thus finally encounters a 
gray nervous spectre that thinks and feels and longs, 
wills and determines and controls, and constitutes 
the last limit of physiological induction in the direc- 
tion of the spiritual. It is in this gray spectre that 
the blind promptings of our animal lives are corre- 
lated as emotion or as thinking — as consciousness. 

Try to imagine this ultimate nervous man in 
which our higher energy is resident, and you but 
haunt your dreams with a thin and filmy ghost, that 
confronts you night and day in the image of your- 
self — matter's final Dqppelgdnger of what you feel 
to be the inner psychic man. For myself, I frankly 
confess that this gray, filmy shadow is seldom absent 
from my reveries. On the other hand, by some 
strange law of life, you find it just as impossible to 
identify this nerve-spectre with the ultimate psychi- 
cal reality that constitutes your final self, as it is to 
identify muscle with the mind that moves it. It is 
to this nerve-spectre of ourselves, in its states of 
reflex excitability, that physiological investigation 



174 PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 

finally traces that motor and sensory aura that forms 
the scientific basis of the phenomena termed spiritual. 
Tracing the two gray middle strands of the spinal 
axis into the brain, the physiologist finds them ex- 
panded into the two olivary bodies, and into masses 
of gray matter penetrated by white fibres, and finally 
into an intricately convolved membranous envelope 
termed the cortex. In the frontal and inferior por- 
tions of this gray cerebral envelope are situated 
various nerve-centres coordinating voluntary motion 
and the outward expression of intelligence. This has 
been proved (as before observed) by electrical exci- 
tation of the brain-envelope at the hands of Prof. 
Ferrier ; and I may add, without egotism, that in 
experiments with the brains of dogs, cats, rabbits, 
squirrels, and other animals attainable for the pur- 
pose, I have verified Prof. Ferrier's conclusions in all 
important particulars. In the coronal and central 
region of the brain the tissue gives no muscular 
response to the electrical current ; in a similar man- 
ner, making a deep incision so as to connect the 
current with either of the olivary bodies, an experi- 
ment calling for exceeding delicacy of manipulation, 
no muscular exponents seem to follow electrical ex- 
citation : so that it is evident from experiment that 
the final cognitive tract of the brain lies here, and 
that reflex excitability of this tract is concerned in 
the indrawn and strangely introspective trances of 
epileptics like Swedenborg. This is intellectual epi- 
lepsy in its subtilest form, as illustrated in the cases 



PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 175 

of M. Cazotte and Judge Edmonds, and by no means 
necessarily involves complete unconsciousness of ex- 
ternal occurrences. The superhuman cognition that 
occurs in this special type of the disorder is exempli- 
fied in the case of Captain Densmore, and in those 
strange previsions that have been passingly discussed 
in a preceding section. 

On the other hand, in the dynamic phenomena, 
incident to the seances of Mr. Home, the motor and 
medullary centres appear to be the principal seat of 
reflex excitability. 

To return. The reader is now satisfied, I think, 
that the nervous state termed clairvoyance is the 
centre around which all the phenomena of spiritu- 
alism, psychic as well as dynamic, naturally group 
themselves ; also, that reflex excitability of the nerve- 
centres constitutes the physiological basis of this 
state, and that in vital temperaments it develops 
motor aspects, while in cerebral temperaments it de- 
velops the singular sensory phenomena described in 
the nervo-psychic series ; furthermore, that this state 
is the constant exponent of the epileptic neurosis. 

I find no exception to this view of the case in 
the more than fifty mediums of whom I have collect- 
ed memoranda ; and, without indulging in any un- 
pleasant criticism, I must be permitted to say that 
the association of either class of facts with the agency 
of departed spirits is quite unwarranted and gratui- 
tous. Neither the sensory nor the dynamic phenom- 
ena of spiritualism presume intelligences or forces 



176 PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 

not explainable by physiology. I must ask scientific 
men, however, calmly to investigate the facts inci- 
dent to these nervous states, and to assimilate them 
to systematic psychology — a task calling for the 
limits of a volume. 

Beyond these states, and perhaps in that ultimate 
psychical body that was present to the vision of St. 
Paul and participates in the supersensible reality, 
lie our real spiritual man and the proper sphere of 
religion. With this reality, faith — the highest emo- 
tion of w r hich our natures are capable — is our active 
contact. 

So, then, if at all, our transfiguration comes by 
faith, not by epileptic trances. There are occasions, 
no doubt, when our faculties seem for the moment 
to be unconditioned, and our souls listen vaguely to 
mystic music ; when the supersensible is visible 
through a blur, and the imagination dimly appre- 
hends the higher beautiful. Glimpses these of our 
undeveloped lives, that serve to indicate to ourselves, 
though in the nature of things unverifiable, how dia- 
metrically these undeveloped lives differ from the 
cog-wheel speculations and morbid sensorial im- 
pressions illustrated in the literature of clairvoyance, 
from Swedenborg, its most gifted modern exponent, 
to Davis, Burkmar, and Tarbox, its more famous 
American representatives. Our lives, by dint of the 
undeveloped that lies within them, prophesy vaguely 
always. What wonder, then, if they occasionally 
forebode in very distinct terms ? — 



PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 177 

"The dream of ancient saints hath thus the pith 
And mystic meaning of a Pindaric myth ; 
A strange, sweet poem fancifully wrought 
Unto the current of an inner thought, 
"Whereby, as half-unfolded undertone, 
The dim and mystic permeates the known, 
And all the common things of life are linked 
Unto a music strange and indistinct." 

In concluding this section, permit me to add 
that my own observations have led me insensibly 
during the last ten years to the opinion that, in its 
motor aspects particularly, the nervous conditions 
necessary to so-called spiritual phenomena coexist 
generally with a low type of physical organization, 
and, with very few exceptions, the same criticism 
applies to mediums of the sensory class ; facts suffic- 
ing in themselves to disconnect both classes of phe- 
nomena from the higher spiritual activities of human 
nature. But, what the real nature of nerve-aura is, 
can only be described by the term nerve-aura. It is 
not electrical, though it may be correlated as electri- 
city ; it is not psychic, though it may be correlated 
into apparently psychic phenomena. 

Yery likely, however, some clever scientific man 
will one of these days invent an auroscope, by which 
it will be possible to test the relative capacities of 
mediums, and to distinguish between motor and sen- 
sory, without putting them to the trouble of seances : 
and, in the observations thus far submitted, I have 
sought to get together the materials and experiments 



178 PHYSIOLOGY OF VOLITION AND INTELLIGENCE. 

necessary to an exact scientific demonstration of the 
subject. What is wanted now is, that some scientific 
professor, or some medical psychologist, haying the 
opportunity to study it in all its attitudes, should 
experiment and observe carefully as to the action 
and reaction of nerve-ether with various bodies, un- 
til such an instrument can be constructed as to de- 
termine its presence by an unerring test. Then, let 
this auroscope be applied to one of Mr. Home's 
phantoms, or to those of Mrs. Jenny Holmes, of 
Philadelphia, by way of determining the constitu- 
tion of the former and the genuineness of the lat- 
ter ; and the demonstration will be as complete from 
the stand-point of exact physics as it seems to me 
from the stand-point of physiology. 



VIII. 

A GLANCE AT THE HIGHER RELATIONS OF THE 
SUBJECT. 

That the method of criticism applied in the pre- 
ceding sections, with whatever inadequacy of hand 
— and our best in all these matters falls lamentably 
short of our striving — is the true method to apply 
to all psychological phenomena, there has been no 
doubt for these many years. Turner's critics have 
applied it to him, with the result of giving some 
adequate idea of the man and his artistic products, 
in their mutual relation. All criticism in literature 
and music, and in the drama, that is valuable and 
lasting, possesses these qualities in proportion as it 
applies the physiological method with an accurate 
insight and an enlightened comprehension. A criti- 
cism on Shakespeare, really thorough and profound, 
yet remains to be written, because all his critics, 
Coleridge not excepted, have written with certain 
static and stereotyped ideas of dramatic art. Even 
Goethe is open to rebuke in this aspect of the case* 
deep as his insight was, and pervading as was his 



180 THE HIGHER RELATIONS OF THE SUBJECT. 

reverence for Nature. Says a German, whose works 
are full of wisdom : 

" Erlc-enne, Freund, was er geleistet hat, 
Und dann erJcenne was er leisten wollte ; " 

and this, taking leisten in its deeper sense, as the 
inner wishing of the author's nature and organiza- 
tion, comprehends, in a few words, the alphabet of 
a method of criticism, novel in this volume only in 
its application to so-called spiritual phenomena, and 
but comparatively novel even here — f or Dr. Mauds- 
ley has, as heretofore stated, successfully though 
briefly applied it to the case of Swedenborg's clair- 
voyance and trance-revelations. It yields its finest 
results, however, in tracing the literature of strange 
natures, like Poe and Hawthorne, Dumas and Bau- 
delaire, Goethe and Heyne, Goldsmith and Byron, 
not to mention many more, down to the secret wish- 
ings of the organizations whence it sprang ; but it 
must be carefully guarded from the excessive gener- 
alizing tendency that M. Taine ingrafts upon it in 
his brilliant but superficial and unthoughtful vol- 
umes. That which makes Mr. Carlyle what James 
Russell Lowell styles him, the profoundest critic of 
this century in history and literature, is due to the 
unconscious but singularly unerring sagacity with 
which he applies the substance of the method, with- 
out its dry, scientific details. Witness his criticism 
on Sir Walter Scott, and his paper on Boswell, the 
over-abused biographer of Dr. Johnson, as compared 



THE HIGHER RELATIONS OF THE SUBJECT. 181 

with Macaulay's on the same subject. And, to con- 
clude this paragraph, a consistent application of the 
same method would have saved Prof. Crookes and 
Mr. Alfred P. "Wallace from not a little scientific 
blundering in their investigations of the phenomena 
associated with spiritualism — eminent though they 
are in their especial walks. 

Assuming that the strictly physiological origin 
of the very exceptional psychic and dynamic facts 
enumerated in the preceding sections is fairly made 
out, their vast importance to scientific psychology is 
apparent at a glance, not only to the educated ob- 
server and the journalist of science, but to the well- 
informed general reader ; for psychology is only an 
aspect of physiology, as physiology is only an aspect 
of biology — the life-science, to unravel the problems 
of which all true investigation tends. Valuable as 
have been Herbert Spencer's contributions in this 
field — and it would be difficult to over-estimate them 
— they must assimilate the discoveries of Prof. Fer- 
rier, and the facts of medical observation now ex- 
tant, in order to completeness as a system. For ex- 
ample, in the fact that in the cortex of the brain is 
situated a cognitive tract, while around it is arranged 
a congeries of motor and sensory centres, special- 
ly coordinating the expression of intelligence, and 
specially appropriated to sensation, the enlightened 
student will suspect that the nerve-centre concerned 
in the long-disputed self-consciousness of the older 
psychologists has been at last discovered. If so, 



182 THE HIGHER RELATIONS OF THE SUBJECT. 

that against which. John Stuart Mill argued all his 
life has an appropriate basis in cerebral anatomy, 
and Coleridge was nearer right than his acute and 
subtile critic ; and, if so, the guess of Prof. Bain, to 
the effect that nervous tissue may be thinking tis- 
sue, is verified. And this fact dips so deep into the 
issues of biological speculation, that Herbert Spen- 
cer must modify his definition of life to read some- 
what as follows : Life is self -activity , through con- 
Urinous adjustment of internal relations to external 
relations. 

Here, then, finally, have the often-scouted exper- 
imentalists of the nineteenth century furnished the 
physiological basis for a system of psychology that 
shall be rigidly inductive, and yet shall afford ample 
verge for the softer spiritual undertones of the in- 
strument called man, and for his mystic cognition 
of the ultimate reality, without forcing him for con- 
solation to the spectral seances of Mr. Home. 



THE END. 



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" The work is probably the ablest exposition of the subject which has been given to the world, and goes 
far to establish a new system of Mental Philosophy, upon a much broader and more substantial basis than 
it has heretofore stood." — St. Louis Democrat. 

" Let us add that nothing we have said, or in any limited space could say, would give an adequate con- 
ception of the valuable and curious collection of facts bearing on morbid mental conditions, the learned 
physiological exposition, and the treasure-house of useful hints for mental training, which make this large 
and yet very amusing, as well as instructive book, an encyclopasdia of well-classified and often very 
startling psychological experiences." — London Spectator. 

THE EXPANSE OF HEAVEN. A Series of Essays on the Wonders of 
the Firmament. By R. A. Proctor, B. A. 

** A very charming work ; cannot fail to lift the reader's mind up ' through Nature's work to Nature's 
God.' " — London Standard. 

" Prof. R. A. Proctor is one of the very few rhetorical scientists who have the art of making science 
popular without making it or themselves contemptible. It will be hard to find anywhere else so much 
skill in effective expression, combined with so much genuine astronomical learning, as is to be seen in h.s 
new volume." — Christian Union. 

PHYSIOLOGY FOR PRACTICAL USE. By various Writers. Edited 
by James Hinton. With 50 Illustrations. 1 vol., i2mo. Price, $2.25. 

" This book is one of rare value, and will prove useful to a large class in the community. Its chief 
recommendation is in its applying the laws of the science of physiology to cases of the deranged or diseased 
operations of the organs or processes of the human system. It is as thoroughly practical as is a book of 
formulas of medicine, and the style in which the information is given is so entirely devoid of the mystification 
of technical or scientific terms that the most simple can easily comprehend it." — Boston Gazette. 

" Of all the works upon health of a popular character which we have met with for some time, and we 
are glad to think that this most important branch of knowledge is becoming more enlarged every day, 
the work before us appears to be the simplest, the soundest, and the best." — Chicago Inter-Ocean. 

THE GREAT ICE AGE, and its Relations to the Antiquity of 

Man. By James Geikie, F. R. S. E. With Maps, Charts, and numerous Illus- 
trations. 1 vol., thick i2mo. Price, $2.50. 
'"The Great Ice Age' is a work of extraordinary interest and value. The subject is peculiarly 
attractive in the immensity of its scope, and exercises a fascination over the imag'nation so absorbing that 
it can scarcely find expression in words. It has all the charms of wonder-tales, and excites scientific and 
unscientific minds alike." — Boston Gazette. 

" Every step in the process is traced with admirable perspicuity and fullness by Mr. Geikie." — Lon- 
don Saturday Review. 

p " ' The Great Ice Age,' by James Geikie, is a book that unites the popular and abstruse elements of 
scientific research to a remarkable degree. The author recounts a story that is more romantic than nii.e 
novels out of ten, and we have read the book from first to last with unflagging interest." — Boston Commer- 
cial Bulletin. 

ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE BRITISH ASSOCIA- 
TION, assembled at Belfast. By John Tyndall, F. R. S., President. Re- 
vised, with additions, by the author, since the delivery. i2mo. 120 pages. 
Paper. Price, 50 cents. 
This edition of this now famous address is the only one authorized by the author, and contains addi- 
tions and corrections not in the newspaper reports. 

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MAN". Designed to represent the Existing State 
of Physiological Science as applied to the Functions of the Human Body. By 
Austin Flint, Jr., M. D. Complete in Five Volumes, octavo, of about 500 
pages each, with 105 Illustrations. Cloth, $22.00; sheep, $27.00. Each vol- 
ume sold separately. Price, cloth, $4.50; sheep, $5.50. The fifth and last 
volume has just been issued. 
The above is by far the most complete work on human physiology in the English language. It treats 
of the functions of the human body from a practical point of View, and is enriched by many original ex- 
periments and observations by the author. Considerable space is given to physiological anatomy, par- 
ticularly the structure of glandular organs, the digestive system, nervous system, blood-vessels, organs of 
special sense, and organs of generation. It not only considers the various functions of the body, from an 
exper.mental stand-point, but is peculiarly rich in citations of the literature of physiology. It is therefore 
invaluable as a work of reference for those who wish to study the subject of phvsiology exhaustively. As 
a complete treatise on a subject of such interest, it should be in the libraries of literary and scientific men, 
as well as in the hands of practitioners and students of medicine. Illustrations are introduced wherever 
they are necessary for the elucidation of the text. 

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, 549 & 551 Broadway, N. Y. 



CHRISTIAN REID'S NOVELS. 



VALERIE AYLMER. 8vo. Paper, price, $1.00; cloth, $1.50. 

" One of the best and most readable novels of the season." — Philadelphia Post. 
" The story is of marked and sustained interest." — Chicago Journal . 
"The author is one of the rising and brilliant lights of American literature." — 
Po7'tland A rgus. 

11 The story is very interesting, and admirably written." — Charleston Courier. 

MORTON HOUSE. With Illustrations. 8vo. Paper, price, $1.00; 
cloth, $1.50. 

"For the sake of our literature we trust that the author will not pause in her new 
career, which certainly opens with the bravest promise." — Christian Union. 

" There is intense power in many of the scenes." — New York Evening Mail. 

" Marked by great force and originality." — Philadelphia Age. 

" Interesting from beginning to end." — Eclectic Magazine. 

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equal merit." — Philadelphia Press. 

MABEL LEE. With Illustrations* 8vo. Paper, price, $1.00; 
cloth, $1.50. 

"A story of absorbing interest." — St. Louis Republican. 

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the South. 

"The story is one of thrilling interest." — New York Express. 

"A capital picture of Southern character and society." — Boston Gazette. 

" No American author of to-day charms us so much." — Portland Argus. 

EBB-TIDE. With Illustrations. 8vo. Paper, price, $1.00; cloth, 
$1.50. 

" 'Ebb-Tide' is a story of power and pathos, and will be much admired." — Boston 
Comjnonwealth. 

" Scenes and incidents portrayed with vividness and skill." — Boston Traveller. 

"The plot is interesting and well developed, and the style is both spirited and 
clear." — Boston Gazette. 

NINA'S ATONEMENT, and Other Stories. With Illustrations. 
8vo. Paper, price, $1.00; cloth, $1.50. 

" To readers in want of a book with which to while away an after-dinner hour, or 
cheat railway traveling of its tedium, we commend this collection of stories and nov- 
ellettes." — N. Y. Arcadian. 

A DAUGHTER OE BOHEMIA. 1 vol. Illustrated. Paper, 
price, $1.00; cloth, $1.50. 

" Those who have followed the course of this remarkable story through Appletons' 
Journal will need no fresh incentive to induce them to read it in book -form ; and to 
those who have not thus followed it there remains an opportunity for real mental en- 
joyment which we almost envy them. It is emphatically thus far one of the best novels 
of the season." — The Golden Age. 

" It is a novel of brilliancy and attractiveness in its conversation and style gener- 
ally, on a par with the writer's previous books." — N. Y. Evening Mail. 

R APPLETON & CO., Publishers, 

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"An Interesting, a Truthful, and a Wholesome Book" 

London Athenaeum. 



WILKES, SHERIDAN, FOX. 

The Opposition under George the Third. 

By W. F. RAE. 
8vo. Cloth Price, $2.00. 

" A book which embraces vigorous sketches of three famous men 
like John Wilkes, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Charles James Fox, 
is truly worth having. The author is in evident sympathy with all three 
of his subjects, and yet does not in either case betray an undue partial- 
ity. Although in no instance condoning the private vices and personal 
shortcomings of the characters he has to deal with, he does not allow 
their faults to influence his estimate of the virtues, the talents, and the 
public services, which entitle each of these celebrated men to the admi- 
ration and gratitude of their country. " — Chicago Tribune. 

"The volume is interesting to Americans particularly, as it speaks 
of men who represented largely English sentiments during our struggle 
for independence ; and the opposition of Fox to war in this country, as 
represented in these pages, shows out clearly the love of liberty which 
filled the minds of this man and his worthy colleagues Wilkes and Sheri- 
dan at that time." — Albany Express. 

" All who relish a fine portrayal of good sayings, courageous acts, 
and laudable endeavor, will want to see this work."— Boston Common- 
zuealth. 

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ing the acts and deeds of this triple combination of political giants." — 
Philadelphia Age. 

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Rae in giving new attraction to old subjects so desirable to students of 
biographical history." — Pittsburg Commercial. 

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ful to him for an interesting, a truthful, and a wholesome book." — 
Lojidon Athenceum. 

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A rich list of fruitful topics" 

Boston Commonwealth. 



HEALTH AND EDUCATION, 

By the Rev. CHARLES KINGSLEY, F. L. S., F. G. S., 

CANON OF WESTMINSTER. 

i2mo. Cloth Price, $1.75. 

"It is most refreshing to meet an earnest soul, and such, preeminently, is Charles 
Kingsley, and he has shown himself such in every thing he has written, from ' Alton 
Locke ' and ' Village Sermons,' a quarter of a century since, to the present volume, which 
is no exception. Here are fifteen Essays and Lectures, excellent and interesting in 
different degrees, but all exhibiting the author's peculiar characteristics of thought 
and style, and some of them blending most valuable instruction with entertainment, 
as few living writers can." — Hartford Post. 

"That the title of this book is not expressive of its actual contents, is made mani- 
fest by a mere glance at its pages ; it is, in fact, a collection of Essays and Lectures, 
written and delivered upon various occasions by its distinguished author; as such it 
cannot be otherwise than readable, and no intelligent mind needs to be assured that 
Charles Kingsley is fascinating, whether he treats of Gothic Architecture, Natural 
History, or the Education of Women. The lecture on Thrift, which was intended for 
the women of England, may be read with profit and pleasure by the women of 
everywhere." — St. Louis Democrat. 

" The book contains exactly what every one needs to know, and in a form which 
every one can understand." — Boston Journal. 

" This volume no doubt contains his best thoughts on all the most important topics 
of the day." — Detroit Post. 

"Nothing could be better or more entertaining for the family library. "—Zion's 
Herald. 

" For the style alone, and for the vivid pictures frequently presented, this latest 
production of Mr. Kingsley commends itself to readers. The topics treated are 
mostly practical, but the manner is always the manner of a master in composition. 
Whether discussing the abstract science of health, the subject of ventilation, the 
education of the different classes that form English society, natural history, geology, 
heroic aspiration, superstitious fears, or personal communication with Nature, we 
find the same freshness of treatment, and the same eloquence and affluence of language 
that distinguish the productions in other fields of this gifted author." — Boston Gazette. 

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, 

549 & S5i Broadway, N. Y. 



THE GREAT ICE AGE, 

AND ITS RELATIONS TO THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 

By JAMES GEIKIE, F. R. S. E. 

With Maps, Charts, and numerous Illustrations. 

I vol., thick i2mo. . . . Price, $2.50. 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

" Intelligent general readers, as well as students of geology, will find more infor- 
mation and reasonable speculation concerning the great glacial epoch of our globe in 
this volume than can be gathered from a score of other sources. The author writes 
not only for the benefit of his 'fellow-hammerers,' but also for non- specialists, and 
any one gifted with curiosity in respect to the natural history of the earth will be de- 
lighted with the clear statements and ample illustrations of Mr. Geikie's ' Great Ice 
Age.' " — Episcopal Register. 

" ' The Great Ice Age ' is a work of extraordinary interest and value. The subject 
is peculiarly attractive in the immensity of its scope, and exercises a fascination over the 
imagination so absorbing that it can scarcely find expression in words. It has all the 
charms of wonder- tales, and excites scientific and unscientific minds alike." — Boston 
Gazette. 

, " Mr. Geikie has succeeded in writing one of the most charming volumes in the 
library of popularized science." — Utica Herald: 

" We cannot too heartily commend the style of this book, which is scientific and yet 
popular, and yet not so popular as to dispense with the necessity of the reader's putting 
his mind to work in order to follow out the author in his forcible yet lucid arguments. 
Nor can the attentive reader fail to leave the work with the same enthusiasm over the 
subject as is shown in every page by the talented author. "—Portland Press. 

" Although Mr. Geikie's position in the scientific world is such as to indicate that 
he is a pretty safe teacher, some of his views are decidedly original, and he does not 
make a point of sticking to the beaten path."— Springfield Union. 

"Prof. Geikie's book is one that may well engage thoughtful students other than 
geologists, bearing as it does on the absorbing question of the unwritten history of our 
race. The closing chapter of his work, in which, reviewing his analytical method, he 
constructs the story of the checkered past of the last 200,000 years, can scarcely fail to 
give food for thought even to the indifferent."— Btiffalo Cotirier. 

" Every step in the process is traced with admirable perspicuity and fullness by 
Mr. Geikie."— London Saturday Review. 

"It offers to the^udent of geology by far the completest account of the period yet 
published, and is characterized throughout by refreshing vigor of diction and originality 
of thought."— Glasgow Herald. 

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, 

549 & 5Si Broadway, N. Y. 



THE WORKS OF 

Pro£ JOHN TYNDALL, LLD, F.R.S. 



I. 

HEAT AS A MODE OF MOTION. 

One vol., i2mo. Cloth, $2.00. 

"My aim has been to rise to the level of these questions from a basis so elementary that 
a person possessing any imaginative faculty and power of concentration might accom* 
pdny me."— From Author's Preface. 

II. 

OH SOUND. 

A Course of Eight Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution of Great 
Britain. One vol. With Illustrations. i2mo. Cloth, $2.00. 

*' In the following pages I have tried to render the science of Acoustics interesting to 
alll intelligent persons, including those who do not possess any special scientific culture." 
From Author's Preface. 

III. 

FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE FOR UNSCIENTIFIC 
PEOPLE. 

A Series of Detached Essays, Lectures, and Reviews. One vol., i2ino, 
Cloth, $2.00. 

" My motive in writing these papers was a desire to extend sympathy for science be« 
yond the limits of the scientific public. . . . From America the impulse came which in- 
duced me to gather these ■ Fragments/ and to my friends in the United States I dedicate 
them." — From Author's Preface. 

IV. 
LIGHT AND ELECTRICITY. 

Notes of Two Courses of Lectures before the Royal Institution of Great 
Britain. One vol., i2mo. Cloth, $1.25. 

" In thus clearly and sharply stating the fundamental principles of Electrical and Op- 
tical Science, Prof. Tyndall has earned the cordial thanks of all interested in education."— 
From American Editor's Preface. 

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishsrs, 

549 & SSI Broadway, N. Y. 



THE WORKS OF 

Prof, JOHN TYNDALL, LL.D., F.R.S. 



V. 
HOURS OF EXERCISE IN THE ALPC. 

One vol., i2mo. With Illustrations. Cloth, $2.00. 

" The present volume is for the most part a record of bodily action, written partly to 
preserve to myself the memory of strong and joyous hours, and partly for the pleasure of 
those who find exhilaration in descriptions associated with mountain-life." — From Author's 
Preface. 

VI. 
FARADAY AS A DISCOVERER. 

One vol., l2mo. Cloth, $1.00. 

" It has been thought desirable to give you and the world some image of Michael 

Faraday as a scientific investigator and discoverer I have 

returned from my task with such results as I could gather, and also with the wish that 
these results were more worthy than they are of the greatness of my theme." — The 
Author. 

VII. 

FORMS OF WATER, IN CLOUDS, RAIN, RIVERS, ICE, 
AND GLACIERS. 

This is the first volume of the International Scientific Series, and is a valu- 
able and interesting work. One vol., i2mo. Cloth, $1.50. 

VIII. 

CONTRIBUTIONS TO MOLECULAR PHYSICS IN THE 
DOMAIN OF RADIANT HEAT. 

A Series of Memoirs published in the " Philosophical Transactions " and 
" Philosophical Magazine.'' With Additions. 

D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, 

849 & 551 Broadway, N. Y. 



A New Magazine for Students and Cultivated Readers. 



THE. 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



CONDUCTED BY 
Professor E. L. YOUMANS. 



The growing importance of scientific knowledge to all classes of the 
community calls for more efficient means of diifusing it. The Popular 
Science Monthly has been started to promote this object, and supplies a 
want met by no other periodical in the United States. 

It contains instructive and attractive articles, and abstracts of articles, 
original, selected, and illustrated, from the leading scientific men of differ- 
ent countries, giving the latest interpretations of natural phenomena, ex- 
plaining the applications of science to the practical arts, and to the opera- 
tions of domestic life. 

It is designed to give especial prominence to those branches of science 
which help to a better understanding of the nature of man ; to present the 
claims of scientific education ; and the bearings of science upon questions 
of society and government. How the various subjects of current opinion 
are affected by the advance of scientific inquiry will also be considered. 

In its literary character, this periodical aims to be popular, without be- 
ing superficial, and appeals to the intelligent reading-classes of the commu- 
nity. It seeks to procure authentic statements from men who know their 
subjects, and who will address the non-scientific public for purposes of ex- 
position and explanation. 

It will have contributions from Herbert Spencer, Professor Huxley, 
Professor Tyndall, Mr. Darwin, and other writers identified with specu- 
lative thought and scientific investigation. 

THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY is published in a large 
octavo, handsomely printed on clear type. Terms, Five Dollars per annum t 
or Fifty Cents per copy, 

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

" Just the publication needed at the present day." — Montreal Gazette. 

" It is, beyond comparison, the best attempt at journalism of the kind ever made in this 
Country." — Home Journal. 

" The initial number is admirably constituted." — Evening Mail. 

" In our opinion, the right idea has been happily hit in the plan of this new monthly." 
—Buffalo Courier. 

" A journal which promises to be of eminent value to the cause of popular education in 
this country." — N. V. Tribune. 

IMPORTANT TO CLUBS. 

The Popular Science Monthly will be supplied at reduced rates with any periodi- 
cal published in this country. 

Any person remitting Twenty Dollars for four yearly subscriptions will receive an ex- 
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The Popular Science Monthly and Appletons' Journal (weekly), per annum, $8.00 

l^p^ Payment, in all cases, must be in advance. 

Remittances should be made by postal money-order or check to the Publishers, 

D. APPLETON & CO., 529 & 551 Broadway, Ngt York. 



